The Valkyrie Project (33 page)

Behind another
one of those walls was a vault that safeguarded doctored samples of Androkal that Ana and Etienne had stolen from Triton Labs. Guillermo knew little about what had been done to make it usable, but the accompanying documentation would clarify that. It fueled the Transportation Center, but Memo knew there was more out there, so finding the Triton-brand Androkal fell a bit behind finding the actual location of the Transportation Center.

The
quartet of Gold Team members passed several empty conference rooms outfitted with dark, polished wood tables, around which sat what appeared to be real leather chairs. The rooms that followed were dark, no outside exposure, and held metal tables presumably for interrogation. Not a floor layout he would have chosen, but they pressed on, leaving him to wonder if that had been the original design or the result of a hasty decision.

A message alert tickled the skin of his wrist, bringing him back to the mission. Memo looked down, and a mixture of shock and exasperation leapt from his mouth in a puff of hot air.

--

T
he sound of boots approached. Secret mission or not, the interruptions and distractions just never stopped coming. At what point would it all get too ridiculous to bear?

A trio of armed agents whipped around the corner. The black metal guns coordinated well with their dark suits
—for the men and women both—set off with black belts and matching black boots. Their professional business attire was spattered with what might have been red paint, but in their line of work almost certainly wasn't. It was fresh enough to make Ana pause. As her foot landed she hoped the hitch in her step went unnoticed. She didn't know them, and they didn't know her, and she didn't want to give them a reason to notice her.

Whispers flared up behind her, bits of compressed air relieving the pressure of silence. They must have been as concerned about looking conspicuous as she was. In a normal situation, someone trying that hard to deflect attention would have had a bearing on her mission. People with blood spatter were always involved and there would have been no point in ignoring it. But she had arrived at the Spire with a single-minded focus on plowing through the hostile territory to get what she wanted and get out. Doing to the Continuum what the Valkyrie Project invaders had done to Ana and her friends would be the best revenge she could
get.

The thought of getting revenge on the group that
had stolen the data distracted Ana just enough that she didn't sense the man behind her until the butt end of his gun sliced through the air next to her head.

Ana
managed to angle her body far enough away that it only hit the back of her shoulder. It was still
a solid
hit, though, and only
a solid
cord of muscle absorbing most of the impact kept it from crashing through a bone.

Ana parried a blow, stopping the man's forearm with her own. She tried to hit him just below the ribcage, but he twisted and her fist
collided with
solid
bone. There was a bit of armor there as well, but it felt thin and loose, definitely not the high-tech stuff Ana had gotten when she joined the Continuum.

Blood spatter, shifty looks, and shoddy under
-armor? She was not dealing with Continuum agents. Which, of course, begged the question: were these the same men and women who had attacked the Valkyrie Project?

No time to answer as the man's off hand rocketed toward her jaw. Ana leaned back but still caught his knuckles on the end of her chin. Clearly intended as a knockout blow, the hit jarred her and the tendons burned where it wrenched the
m from the end of her jaw bone. Her vision stayed clear, though, as Ana fell back against the wall behind her, one hand out to steady herself against the hard flat surface. An idea popped into her head and Ana reacted, putting it to work before the man in front of her could land another blow.

She lifted one foot and shoved it against the wall to propel herself in the opposite direction, into the chest of the man. He toppled backward with Ana coming down on top of him. She got her elbow around and underneath her so it jabbed into the man's stomach and crushed his solar plexus and part of his diaphragm as well. He gasped as the sudden breathlessness overtook him, but he still struggled against Ana's attempts to pin him.

She wanted to interrogate him, but given the amount of resistance, she figured it would have to be a more physical questioning. Not that she was in a position to ask any questions at that moment. So she asked herself: why had he not killed her already? Perhaps more important though: where were the other two people who had been with him? Each fighting their own battles? That seemed like a poor allocation of resources to split up when they could have leveled her in a second as a trio. If they'd gone on without the last guy, why send him back at all? Ana had been perfectly content to let the shady characters pass her by a minute earlier.

The man knocked her off, a
nd Ana rolled over a few times. She bounced back to her feet like a cat, claws out, gun from its holster inside her jacket.

Her attacker pushed himself up, stumbled a bit toward the wall and then righted himself. Instead of the butt end of the gun the caveman had used as a club, the business end was pointed at Ana.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"I could ask you the same thing."

"You already know who I am or you wouldn't have attacked me!"

"Ah, clever girl
." He smiled, but the pain in his stomach stole half of it, leaving him with a grimace. "You might just be as smart as Moze always says you are. You're certainly as feisty."

The words were barely out of his mouth when Ana said, "Moze? Where is he?"

"Now who's got the upper hand?"

"You've always had the upper hand! You attacked me, remember?"

The half-smile that remained on the man's face flipped to a full-on frown. He had no reply.

"I hope Moze is working with smarter people than you or he might be dead before I can make you tell me where he is," Ana said.

"Make me? Ana, dear, you must have lost your wits when you heard his name."

She had, in fact, been so focused on him that her mind filtered out the sound of footsteps behind her and the soft exhale of breath that came just before everything went dark.

--

Kicking offspring out of the home
was not an uncommon practice in nature nor among humans. Some animals, and humans, maintained a close connection with their babies—they would always be babies—while others tended to forget as soon as their young were out of sight.

But when the decision
was made for the parents, and their children were removed from their care before either was ready, the psychological bond created was one of the most powerful forces the world was capable of forging.

Guillermo sometimes wished that his near-surrogate parent sister had not been
burdened with the durosteel link that drove her after him like a mourning parent. But since he had returned and seen her pull sword from stone when others scoffed and said it was impossible, he knew that the force of will she possessed, honed by years of practiced determination and demonstrated in every chapter of the story she had so far written, was exactly the intangible, indescribable weapon he needed. The problem then became the way to heat the iron so it could be transformed from an automatic weapon capable of dealing pain and death and wreaking indiscriminate havoc to be forged into a sword of destiny with the singular purpose of saving the world.

These thoughts had cycled through his head so often that when he heard the call that she was in the building, he wanted to run to her, pluck the sword from the burning embers and hold it high, proclaiming to the world that together they could not be stopped.

But genetics were genetics, and saving Ana from the fire too soon would leave her brittle and weak and likely to snap the first time she was thrust into battle.

"You hit her over the head?"

Sera looked sheepish while Jordan just looked away.

"You didn't have any tranq rounds left?"

"We used them up getting onto the data floor and then coming up here."

"Well
, let me just mark that down on the shopping list. Double batch of tranquilizers."

The room to which they had brought the captive barely held the four of them and having
three more loitering outside didn't make Guillermo feel any better.

"So we don't even know how long she'll be out?"

"Come on, Moze," Sera said. "Tranquilizer estimates are a crap shoot at best, you know that. And given her unique genetic makeup, who knows if those estimates would even be accurate?"

Whip smart
, Sera was. She reminded him of what Ana must have been like through all those years he’d missed. Of course, cuffed to the leg of a table welded to the floor, Ana looked like a hamstrung gazelle waiting for a lion to come tear her apart. Her head lolled a bit, hair closing like a curtain across her face. Then her back stiffened. She was coming around already.

"Okay
, folks," Guillermo said. "Time to clear out."

He ushered Jordan and Sera out where they joined the man who had failed to subdue
Ana, along with Codar and Ikashi, the two others Guillermo had chosen to bring along.

Guillermo paused at the door, looking back at the caged creature, the sleeping giant, alone and helpless once more.

Ana raised her head, and her eyes pierced the veil of her hair with a strength, intensity, and ferocity that made Guillermo grin. He returned her stare with one of his own, and watched as the awareness of that look—and the man behind it—tore across her face in a series of progressive emotions. Confusion and anger—as she jerked her arms against the cuffs and realized she was stuck—and loss—as Guillermo closed the door. She called his name, but the door smothered the sound.

--

The electrocuffs weren't turned on, but the metal still dug and scraped Ana's wrists as she flailed about trying to free herself. She cried out but wasn't sure if her mouth formed words comprehensible in any language. She realized quickly, like she knew she should, that neither the cuffs nor the table were going anywhere. Then she slumped against the table leg, as much as she could slump with her body pinned the way it was, and began to brood. Then stew. Then scheme. Though the scheming consisted mostly of trying to block out the blurry vision of her brother and thwarting the attempts at comprehension and rationalization that her mind created during the brooding and stewing.

After a while
—she couldn't be sure how long—Ana's eyes dilated to make use of the narrow shaft of light that came in through the tiny window in the door and she decided to look around the room to see if there was anything to help her get out. She shimmied up the leg of the table, working the cuffs up inches at a time, trying not to damage any muscles or ligaments while moving her arms awkwardly with them trapped behind her back. At a position that approximated upright, Ana rotated a few degrees at a time, scanning the dark room. The dark, empty room.

Just as Ana got around as far as she could go to her right, she spotted a small white object at the opposite corner of the table. Ana craned her neck, but there was nothing else on the table, and nothing she could see on the floor. She doubted that Memo would leave something in the room
by accident with her locked up there. She didn't know how he expected her to get it, though. If Ana had been facing the table, she could have reached it with an outstretched leg, but with the corner of the table poking her in the back and the key to the cuffs as far across the table as it possibly could be, her flexibility was not enough to get there. She swung a leg up and around to her right first, and then to the left just to make sure. The failure brought with it hesitation, suspicion, and the questions that had clawed at her while Ana planned her escape. She slumped with her left leg still up on the table and as the corner at the short side of the table caught the lip of her boot, it pulled her down onto the table just enough for it to occur to her that she might be able to contort herself up onto the table if she flipped up on her back.

She turned back to the long side of the table and took a shuffle
-step running start, swinging both legs off the ground and onto the table—so much for saving muscles and ligaments. Nothing tore, but Ana's shoulders burned and she needed to catch the breath that was knocked out of her lungs when her back smacked the hard metal table. She lay there for a moment before carefully sliding her legs down the table to cradle the small lump. Using her calf, Ana brought it halfway across the table—far enough that she could stand up again and get it the rest of the way. After doing that, she maneuvered the key with her elbow, off the edge of the table, holding her breath as she did.

The key fell and bounced away from her when it hit ground. Ana lowered herself back to the hard durocrete floor, her arms arching from the strain of moving while restricted,
and hoped it would still be within reach.

It lay just close enough for Ana to place
her lower leg to the outside of it, trying to figure out how she would get it all the way back to her hands. Then there was the small task of fitting the key to the lock to undo the cuffs. First things first, though.