The Cage of Zeus (29 page)

“What are you thinking? Don’t be stupid.”

“I’ll be fine, I’m armed.”

“What?”

“I found a gun on one of the guards Karina took out. She must have taken his primary weapon but overlooked his backup.”

“You don’t know the first thing about handling a gun. You’ll only be a danger to yourself. Get back here right now,” Tigris pleaded.

“I didn’t have any trouble shooting it. I also found some data goggles to help me see in the dark.”

“Stop what you’re doing, Calendula. I can’t bear to see you die.”

“I’m sorry, but there’s no turning back now,” Calendula said. “I feel as if something inside me has been shattered. At the same time, my mind is clear.”

“That’s the fever talking. You’ve been infected. You’re sick. Right now you’re not thinking straight. Come home so you can have your medicine and rest, Calendula. I promise I won’t leave your side.”

“How are the children?”

“Fighting the fever like the others, but they’re tough. They’ll stay strong until they enter remission.”

“Look after them for me, Tigris.”

“Please don’t go. I’m begging you.”

Calendula ended the transmission. Then ey ran down the corridor with the gun in eir hand.

Using his implant, Shirosaki split up the members of his security unit into teams and dispatched them to guard the escape shuttles. Then he proceeded to put on his ballistic suit. With their depleted numbers, he would have to engage in combat himself. Even if Karina did not surface near his position, he would have to get between Karina and Harding to keep him from killing her.

Harding was intent on killing Karina. Miles’s death had put him over the edge.

Shirosaki was painfully aware of Harding’s need for revenge. But at the same time, he desperately wanted the data Karina was holding—coveted it, in fact. Even learning how the parasitic machine worked would help the medical team save the Rounds.

Shirosaki called Kline from his implant. “I’m headed for shuttle number three now. How much power has been restored to the station?”

“We managed to get some of the high-velocity elevators working.”

“Any near my current location?”

“There is one working elevator in your vicinity.”

“Any concern about it malfunctioning?”

“No, it’s been cleared with maintenance.” After a pause, Kline informed Shirosaki of another piece of bad news. “Dr. Tei is down with the fever.”

“The doctor’s been infected?”

“It appears so.”

“The doctor was wearing eir protective suit when ey was examining the Rounds. How in the world was ey infected?”

“The doctor thinks it was Karina.”

“I don’t understand.”

“None of the station staff or Karina have manifested symptoms, so the doctor assumed that Monaurals can’t be infected. But maybe they can be carriers of the disease,” Kline explained. “If what the doctor is saying is true, it’s possible everyone who’s been in contact with Karina, including the people who interrogated her, may have been infected. We may be looking at a good number of security personnel, including you.”

Shirosaki quickly did the math in his head. The security team members who had cornered Karina in the maintenance shaft, Harding and the two guards present during the interrogation, and himself. “So the reason Karina has been running around the station is—”

“She may be a carrier and is trying to spread the agent throughout the station.”

Unbelievable,
Shirosaki thought.
To think that Karina would use her own body to spread a potentially lethal contagion.

But if she would resort to such methods, she must be familiar with the nature of the dispersed substance. Even she isn’t so suicidal as to poison her own body without knowing how to neutralize its effects afterward.

“What is the doctor’s condition?” Shirosaki asked.

“Despite running a very high fever, ey seems conscious and alert. Ey asked me to pass a message on to you.”

“What is it?”

“Ey was sorry for having accused you earlier. Ey knows you’re here fighting as much as the Rounds. Ey also said, please don’t die. Ey asked me to tell you that ey didn’t want you to throw away your life needlessly.”

“Please tell the doctor that ey needn’t worry. I’m not so easily angered. Once we’ve dealt with Karina, I’ll look in on the doctor. Tell em ey can count on it.”

“I’ll do that,” said Kline. “Be careful, Commander.”

“You too, Ms. Kline.”

8

KARINA WAS ABLE
to visualize her exact location as she continued moving toward the shuttle. She had been coming to Jupiter-I as a scientist for ten years, and in the last two years especially, Karina had walked every inch of the station and committed it to memory.

From the location of the room where she’d been kept to the closest high-velocity elevator that would take her to the shuttle, as well as the alternative routes to get to her destination—all flashed across Karina’s mind without having to rely on a map.

Karina took a mental tally of how many security personnel she had disposed of.

The two in the maintenance shafts, four during the escape from the room, the three that had pursued her afterward. The four she’d shot when she’d been on the run with Fortia. That made thirteen. Since there were forty members on the security force, that made twenty-seven left standing.

The cockpit of the shuttle that Lobe attempted to board had been destroyed in the gunfight. Aside from the shuttles dedicated to the special district, there were only three operable shuttles remaining. And the two cargo vessels from Asteroid City. With the exception of the passenger vessel the relief team had come in on, the security force would have to split up to guard all five of the remaining spacecraft, making out to roughly five members per vessel. Even if the station staff were sent to aid in the defense, there was little help that a bunch of gun-toting amateurs would be able to offer.

Five more. Five more kills and she would be able to board a vessel.

Having seized not just the ballistic vests but the firearms and ammunition of the guards she’d killed, Karina was amply armed.

Although a bullet at close range would likely break her ribs or certainly injure her anywhere else, thanks to her vest neither would prove fatal. She would be able to go on fighting as long as the neural inhibitor was working. She would be able to withstand a hit or two.

And as long as they wanted the data, they couldn’t kill her. But there was nothing stopping Karina from killing them.

Harding was the one she had to worry about. The bastard was out for blood. She could see it in his eyes. Harding was using the job as an excuse to come after her with everything he had.

As prepared as she’d been, Karina could not help but smile bitterly at how she’d been doing nothing but killing since she’d arrived. When she left Libra, she had sworn to never pick up a gun again. How had her life come to this?

After Karina had learned to fire a gun at age nine and been party to countless acts of terrorism by the end of her teens, her last kill on Earth had been her own mother.

When a Libra sleeper cell took an all-out attack by antiterror forces, Karina and her mother had run into each other during their ragged escape.

Her mother had been trying to catch up to the others fleeing the compound.

Karina had been in the midst of fleeing Libra.

“Help me get back with the others,” her mother had begged. Karina had cried, “No more,” and pointed her gun. Her mother’s face grew red with rage and terror, and she opened her mouth like a snake threatening to swallow her prey whole and shouted hysterically. “You’re going to shoot me? Your own mother? Who do you think raised you? Put food in your mouth?”

“I’ve had enough,” cried Karina. “You—a mother? Don’t make me laugh. You fell in with a good-for-nothing man and dragged me along for your selfish desires. I couldn’t go to school. I have been on the run my entire life because of you. I’ve wanted to kill you for a very long time. Since I was a kid, I knew I had to kill you to get out of this life.”

“You’ll go to hell for this,” her mother said. “God will never forgive what you’re about to do. Never.” She pointed to the sky and, like a ruined woman, let out a shriek with her very last breath. “Look up at the sky! The eye of God.”

Karina pulled the trigger. It took all of two bullets to fell her mother, who’d been worn down by years of fugitive life. She had gone quietly. Like a toy whose batteries had run down, she fell to the ground never to be revived again.

In that moment, Karina felt as if a wall had come crumbling down around her. Karina had heard the angels trumpeting the end of her imprisonment and saw Jacob’s ladder descend from the heavens where her mother had pointed. And while she had obviously not seen angels dancing atop its rungs, she had clearly heard a benediction rain down from the gray sky above.

She had sobbed and basked in how suddenly vast her world had become. How this beautiful world belonged to her. She was free to live as she pleased without anything to tie her down, without having to live on the run.

Karina left her mother’s body where it fell and ran.

Run. Forget.
She was done with this life. She would go back to the life before Libra. She was ready for any hardship, prepared to work her fingers to the bone. Karina resolved to save some money and live on her own. As long as she didn’t have to kill, she would find some reason to live, no matter how mundane it was.

For several years afterward, Karina experienced a different kind of adversity. Living a normal life had turned out to be a greater challenge than a life of killing.

Nevertheless, Karina endured. She had toiled and saved through less than commendable methods, and although she had no one to celebrate her admission to university with, she was happy.

Finally, a life I can call my own.

Before Karina knew it, twenty years had passed. Having abandoned Earth, she had moved to Europa, one of Jupiter’s satellites, spending her days researching the marine organisms inhabiting the ocean. As tedious as the job was, she had grown to appreciate its simple rewards. Above all, she had grown to love Europa’s microorganisms. There was something tender and precious about the way they persevered in Europa’s harsh environment without complaint.

Karina had reached an age where she could look at herself in the mirror and count the number of years she had left.

There was also a hint of her mother creeping into her aging countenance.

So you’ve chased me down here
, Karina sneered. But that threat was no longer something she had to worry about.

In killing her, Karina had deprived her mother of the opportunity to speak for her sins and deprived herself of the chance to hear an apology.

There would be no apology from her mother, ever. Nor any admission of guilt. She had died believing she was right, and it was Karina who’d killed off the opportunity to make her repent and squandered her only chance to witness her mother’s remorse.

But whether such an opportunity would have ever arrived was never clear.

One day, several years after Karina had started working at the research station on Europa, the director of the station received a package of frozen fruit from Earth.

After opening the package for all of the researchers to see, Director Weil had boasted that while research supplies and provisions were brought in from Mars, these had been sent to him from a friend on Earth.

“They’re frozen but naturally grown,” Weil had said. “These fruit weren’t grown in any greenhouse but in a tropical region on Earth. They smell and taste like the sun.”

Weil had shared the fruit with everyone in the station.

Karina took the mango in her hand; a distant memory came rushing back to her.

Mangoes.

The Summer Dome.

The Summer Dome was a conservatory housing tropical plants and animals where Karina liked to go when she was seven and still living in Japan.

She had looked forward to seeing how various tropical fruits had grown with every visit and delighted in observing the green, unripened fruit gradually turn color. Mangoes, papayas, passion fruit. Although she had tasted them as juices or sherbet, she had never eaten the actual fruit.

I wonder what they taste like,
she had mused as a curious seven-year-old.
Are they more delicious when picked off the branch? Or maybe they’re surprisingly bitter. No, they have to be delicious, considering how much care is given to growing them.

One day, giving in to temptation, Karina had climbed up onto the stone wall and reached for one of the fruit. After struggling on her tiptoes, she picked a mango off a branch and was caressing it tenderly in her arms when someone called out to her.

“Do you like mangoes?”

Karina nearly jumped out of her shoes and shot her eyes in every direction.

She found a boy several years older than she looking up at her from a distance. The moment their eyes met, she felt a shiver run down her spine. Her body went stiff, overcome by shame at having been seen. It was enough to make her want to cry.

The boy bounded closer and scrambled up the stone wall to where she stood. Though he didn’t speak his name, he appeared innocent enough. Standing on his toes, he began to pick the mangoes that had been out of Karina’s reach and tossed them in her arms until she told him to stop.

The conservatory, though open to the public, wasn’t an orchard where picking fruit was allowed. But like Karina, the boy appeared to be itching to get his hands on them.

Perhaps he was glad to have found a co-conspirator.

Struggling with the mangoes in her arms, Karina found herself laughing. When she looked at him, the boy smiled bashfully for the first time.

By then they had become fast friends.

Karina and the boy went around the conservatory picking fruit from one tree after the next. Every time they happened upon a rare fruit, they twisted it off the tree without any reservation, not for the purpose of eating it but just to revel in the act when no adults were looking. It was their delinquency that thrilled them. They were enthralled by what was forbidden. The two might have romped around together for about an hour. As night began to descend over the conservatory, the boy simply said, “I’ll see you around,” and left.