Severance (23 page)

“Come on, Stein! Back way’s clear!” Bruce yelled from
somewhere behind her. But she was still stuck, arms and legs refusing to
respond, bound tight by fear. More officers streamed in the door in front of
her, a vicious volume of fire erupting from their guns. They still hadn’t seen
her, or hadn’t cared, too busy fighting her brave and useful friend.

Finally, one of the officers saw her, a look of recognition
splashed across his face. He raised his pistol.

A bright flash of light and then darkness.

§

Outside the back of the hideout, Bruce stopped, gun pointed
at the door he had just exited from. A security goon appeared in the door,
Bruce pegging him neatly in the face with a stun shot, blood spurting from the
goon’s nose. Bruce backpedaled, gun still trained on the door. Another flicker
of movement, Bruce scaring it back inside with two more stun shots that thudded
into the door frame. He reached the corner of the street and sidestepped,
taking cover behind the edge of a building.

“Dammit, Stein!” he hissed, though he was more angry with
himself than her. He should have known she would freeze, should have come up
with another plan. At minimum, he should have gone down fighting with her. But
there had been no time for thinking, barely time for manic reactions. Just
shooting and ducking and hurling grenades like a monkey.

Footsteps. Bruce steadied himself, waiting. A security
officer appeared around the corner in front of him, Bruce firing a shot in his
chest. As the officer fell to the ground, Bruce fired another pair of shots
into his groin.
That felt good.
More footsteps. “Crap!” Bruce said,
steadying himself.

By the third iteration of rounding a corner only to be
dropped by a shot to the face or groin, the security officers had learned their
lesson, and he heard no more advancing footsteps. But he knew they would be
circling around him or calling for support. Still too many of them left, too
many to charge, too many to fight off and rescue Stein. He wished he had some
Brash with him, wished he wasn’t so useless. Bruce turned and ran, hating
himself more with every step he took.

§

The officers sprawled across the briefing room, making a
mockery of the furniture’s ergonomic design. The tables and floors were
littered with helmets, pistols, intimidation knives, thumping sticks. The men
looked tired and angry, Helot thought, realizing with a start that at least
some of that anger may have been directed at him.

Thorias stood at the head of the room, not sprawled in the
slightest. Helot had invited himself along with Thorias, curious to see the
ship’s security forces up close. As they had traveled to the briefing room on
one of the upper–levels of the security base, he had been surprised at how
empty it was. Considering the amount of activity that must be going on, he had
assumed the place would be swarming with security men. Which meant that
hundreds of security officers were elsewhere. Helot realized that his security
chief had been furtively moving his officers about, setting up the lines and
arrows on his map without telling him. He wasn’t going to dress the chief down
in front of his men, but this was something he would have to keep an eye on.

Sergeant Koller entered the room and sprawled amongst the
rest of the officers, his position towards the front of the room the only sign
of his seniority. He directed a long, disdainful look at Helot before turning
his attention to Thorias.

“Well?” Thorias finally asked.

Koller shook his head. “Nothing.” Koller and his team were
the ones Thorias had sent out mayor–hunting. Unsuccessfully, it seemed.

“Care to expand on that?” Thorias asked.

“It was empty,” Koller said. They had found footage of
Kinsella entering his home shortly after the failed attempt to split the ship. “He
had a hidden back door in his bedroom. The hooker door, I guess. Staircase
there, went all the way down to level two. No footage of him coming out, but he
could have been in disguise. He had a ton of wigs in that bedroom. Like, a ton.”
Koller extended his arms to indicate how many wigs the mayor had. Helot raised
his eyebrows. It was a lot.

“How about his associates?”

“Bletmann’s place was empty too. No wigs though, thank fuck.
Tried a couple other of his friend’s places, too. All blanks.”

Thorias turned to look at Helot for instructions. Helot just
stared back at him blankly.
What else can we do?

Thorias turned back to his officers. “Well then, keep
trying,” he said. “Friends of friends. Acquaintances of acquaintances. Find out
who the hell is making all these wigs and break some of his fingers.”

Helot stepped outside and rubbed his face in his hands.
Why
was everything so hard?
A moment later, Thorias joined him outside.
Wordlessly, they began walking down the nearly deserted corridors of the
security base.

“He doesn’t wear wigs in public, does he?” Helot asked after
a while.

“No, not that I’m aware of.”

“Which means he’s wearing them in private.”

“That stands to reason.”

“Why am I thinking about that?”
Helot shouted. “Why
can’t I stop thinking about the mayor’s sexy wig time? What a fucking disaster!”

“I’d try not to think…”

“What if there aren’t even any hookers?
What if it’s just
him and the wigs?
”

Helot’s despair was interrupted by a beep from Thorias’
terminal and Thorias’ abrupt and grateful grab for the device. The pair of them
stopped in the entrance lobby for the security base. The chief clucked his
tongue a couple times. “Well, there’s some good news,” he finally said. “We’ve
taken Laura Stein into custody.”

“Who?”

“The terrorist. The lady one.”

“Oh, right. The Argos’ most wanted criminal. I guess the
danger’s over then.” Helot chuckled.

“She’s being held in the bow detachment. Looks like she and
her buddy tore up Hogg’s team pretty bad. They lost the fat one entirely.”

“I thought Hogg wasn’t that bad?”

“So did I.” The pair resumed their journey, stepping out of
the security base into the street. A couple blocks north of them, the massive
bulkhead door loomed. “What do you want to do with her?” Thorias asked. “Throw
away the key?”

Helot stared at the bulkhead door and all the bad decisions
its presence reminded him of. He closed his lips and exhaled, inflating his
cheeks. “How close did she come to figuring it all out?”

“Close. Her and her buddy were snooping after the other dead
technician. We know they saw one of the disconnects.”

Helot’s eyes narrowed. The other dead technician. The other
murdered
technician. Yet another reason to reign in Thorias and his goons. “Think
she’ll start squawking about it?” He shook his head, knowing the answer. “Of
course she will. I would.” He exhaled. “Can we bring her down here? Away from
anyone who might be willing to listen?”

Thorias nodded. “I’ll have her moved to the main holding
cells right now.” He tapped something into his terminal. “How long we going to
keep her for?”

Helot turned away from the door. “I guess we can probably
just hang on to her until we’re ready to try again,” he said. “Then cut her
loose.”

“Or just leave her there in the cells. The security base
should remain intact when we detach.”

Helot snorted.
Should.
Another life tossed around
pretty casually. “Fine,” he said and walked away from the bulkhead door,
wanting to get away from the security man. From all the security men.

§

Stein opened her eyes. She was looking at something large
and flat. Something that looked pretty floorish.
I know this. I know this
thing. This is a floor.

She closed her eyes again, the strain of piecing this
together having exhausted her. Her head throbbed. Her legs throbbed. Her
stomach throbbed. The volume of half–digested food rocketing up her throat may
also have throbbed, but given its rapid movement, it was hard to tell. The probable
floor in front of her was soon coated by a definite layer of vomit.

She opened her eyes again. Everything outside the center of
her vision was blurry, as was everything inside the center of her vision. She
could tell she was in a room, empty save for a couple of large, blurry objects
and a puddle of blurry vomit. Rushing things, she tried to sit up, failing
completely. Her hands seemed to be bound together behind her. A couple of minutes
passed, as she let her brain reacquaint itself with her body. Eventually, she
tried sitting up again, this time more or less succeeding.

“Look who’s awake.” A man’s voice, behind her. She dragged
herself around to face him, her vision finally starting to clear up. She was in
a jail cell, a small room with a bunk on one side, toilet in the corner. One
end of the room was sealed with heavy plastic bars, behind which stood a
security officer, looking at her sternly. She squinted, recognizing him. The
officer who’d been investigating Gabelman’s death. Hogg.

“Where am I?” she tried to ask, though her ears told her
that what she said sounded more like “Hurk.” Her mouth filled with saliva, the
act of speaking spreading the bile taste in her mouth.

“Where?” Hogg said. “In trouble. More specifically, a holding
cell in the Detachment on 40
^th
. So, Big Trouble. And don’t move
around too much. It just makes things worse.”

“Gotcha,” she replied, her ears informing her that she had
gotten that sound basically right. She twisted her body around to face the rear
wall, and waggled her arms, still bound behind her back. “So, you’re not going
to take these off, then?”

“No.”

“Okay,” Stein said, after a moment’s consideration. “Is that
even legal? Isn’t that, like, abuse?”

“I think the laws prohibiting abusing you would be rapidly
redefined if this ever went to court,” Hogg said. “You have pissed a lot of
people off.”

“Oh.” Any despair she might have felt at her situation quickly
turned to annoyance, that familiar feeling of self–righteousness coursing
through her. “So, you’re just here to mock me, then?”

Hogg looked at her carefully for a moment before responding.
“I’m here because I want to know where your friend went.”

Stein laughed. “Slippery isn’t he? I’ve honestly got no
idea. Someplace stupid I imagine. Good luck bringing him down. Better men than
you have tried.”

Hogg smiled, his lips tight on his teeth. “You weren’t that
hard to find once. I think we’ll manage.”

Her shoulders sagged fractionally; he had a point. She tried
to stand up, nailing it on her first try. She celebrated by sitting down
heavily on the bunk. “We aren’t terrorists,” she said.

“Okay. Don’t care.”

Ah.
She’d forgotten what it was like dealing with a
security officer she wasn’t fucking on the side. “Why not?” she finally asked. “Seems
the kind of thing you should care about.” She banged her head against the wall
behind her. She’d had a speech prepared for this, her innocence speech. But the
words were all scrambled now. “Everything that Captain Helot said about us was
a lie.” She looked at Hogg, who was wearing an expression that implied he was
daring her to make him care. “You probably don’t believe me right now,” she
continued. “That’s okay. I wouldn’t either.”

“You and your friend incapacitated a half–dozen security
officers in front of my eyes,” Hogg replied.

“I guess there’s that,” she allowed. “Wasn’t really me that
did that though.”

“And then there’s the two men you killed last night.”

“We didn’t kill anyone last night.” She shook her head. “That’s
part of the lie. What were their names? The people we killed?”

Hogg’s eyebrows furrowed. “And there’s Ron Gabelman.”

Stein shivered. She’d forgotten about Ron. “That wasn’t us,
either.” She looked Hogg in the eyes. “Do you really believe I killed Ron?”

“I do now.” Stein looked away from him and his smug face. Then
she realized something: he didn’t seem to be lying. Which meant he honestly
wasn’t aware of the plot. Helot had kept it from him, too.

Twisting around, she struggled to prop herself up on the
hard pillow, trying to face Hogg from a sitting position. “Okay, I get it. Time
to lay all the cards on the table.” She hesitated, and looked at her feet for a
while, ordering her words. “The captain is trying to divide this ship in two. I
mean literally, physically, run it through a saw, divide the ship in two. The
entire aft section of the ship, above the fourth level, the part with the
engines and main fuel tanks — it’s designed to pop off like a cork. The massive
shaking we felt wasn’t a terrorist attack. It was a botched attempt to
split.
The. God. Damned. Ship. In two.
”

Hogg had been pretty stationary during this whole process
but somehow became even more still, his only movement being a gradual widening
of the eyes. Seconds passed. A smile thawed his face, and he began to chuckle
softly. “I get to hear a great deal of bullshit in this job, but that? That’s
the best one yet. That bullshit is
classy
.”

She continued, ignoring his sleight. “Everything since then
has been an effort by the captain to conceal what he did. The announcement
about the fake terrorist attack. The bulkhead doors and the barricades. The
entire aft has been locked down while he tries again.”

“To saw the ship in half?”

“Yes!”

Hogg let out a short bark, the opening fraction of a laugh. “You
people can always tie every damned thing into your conspiracies. Everything’s
proof if you squint at it long enough.”

Stein swallowed, working to control her frustration. “So,
you honestly didn’t know?”

“Know what?” Hogg asked, enunciating each word carefully. “Did
I know the captain was slicing the ship in two? No. I didn’t know that.”