Waypoint Kangaroo (29 page)

Alarm lights start flashing everywhere. Someone must have hit the panic button. There's no sound on the recording. The engineering crew stare offscreen with horrified looks on their faces. Then, one by one, they move out of the room, crossing the yellow-and-black safety line and going through the main doors.

Xiao lingers, and I see his mouth flapping as he waves the others on. The attacker pushes himself forward into frame again and touches his feet against the floor—probably wearing stick-shoes to keep himself anchored. He has one arm around Ellie, pinning her arms to her sides. His other arm holds a knife to her throat. She's no longer wearing her jetpack.

I'm doing my best to analyze the situation tactically. I tell myself it's just like reviewing battle source vids during the war. It was my job to witness, not to judge or intervene. I clinically recorded the details of each awful event so nobody else would need to suffer the horror of seeing it firsthand.

But this is different. It's not an anonymous soldier whose carotid artery is in danger of being severed onscreen. That's Ellie. We were having dinner together barely an hour ago, and now—

“How old is this recording?” I ask.

Erica points at the timestamp in the corner of the vid, then checks her wristband. “Three minutes.”

Three minutes. If he opens that artery, she's dead in sixty seconds. Come on, Ellie, fight!

But I know this doesn't end well.

The attacker's face mask ripples and moves. Xiao's mouth flaps as he lands and anchors his own feet. He unstraps his jetpack, flings it aside, pats his chest.

I can guess what Xiao's saying—
let her go, take me instead
—and I know it won't happen. Xiao's about the same size as the attacker. Ellie's smaller, easier to subdue with physical force. And she's the ship's chief engineer. More valuable hostage.

I wouldn't make the trade.

More silent arguing. The attacker tightens his arm around Ellie, shakes her body. I can tell she's doing her best to stay still, to avoid provoking him. I hope she's doing that on purpose. I hope she's planning something.

Xiao's expression becomes sullen. He turns to the nearest control station and taps the console. The doors to main engineering slide shut.

“Goddammit!” I hear myself saying.

The attacker says something else. Xiao shakes his head. The attacker jostles Ellie again and presses the knife under her jaw. Her skin tightens around the blade.

Xiao turns to the console and slowly works the controls. The attacker steps forward. Then, almost casually, he moves the knife away from Ellie and plunges it into Xiao's back.

I hear Galbraith gasp. I think the captain's saying something in another language. I'm not sure.
Blade went in flat. Between the ribs, into a lung. That's training. Trained killer.

On the vid, Ellie struggles to break free of the attacker's grip. He pivots at the waist and slams her head into the station next to Xiao, hard. Ellie goes limp, and the attacker shoves her to the ground.

A dark stain is spreading across Xiao's back. The attacker grabs Xiao's head, pulls the knife from between his ribs, and draws it across his throat. A spray of red covers the display in front of them.

The attacker jerks Xiao's body back from the console and lets it tumble away. Blood escapes from his neck in a slow ribbon that separates into dark, quivering, wine-colored blobs. The attacker bends down and grabs Ellie again. He turns her to face the camera—
fuck, he knows where the cameras are, what else does he know?
—and presses the bloodstained knife against her unconscious face. The message is pretty clear.

Then he stabs the knife into the control console, and the recording ends.

The feed switches back to Jemison. She's outside the door to main engineering. I see security and engineering crews behind her, jamming tools into open access panels.

“The other engineers say he threatened to kill her if they didn't clear the room,” Jemison says. Her voice is steady and cold.

“What does he want?” Galbraith says.

“We don't negotiate with terrorists,” Jemison says.

“But Ellie—”

“Ellie's gone.” Jemison's glare could cut glass. “If she's not dead already, she will be soon.”

My hands are fists, and my fingernails are digging into my palms.

“You don't know that!” Galbraith says. “She could be—”

“We do not negotiate!” Jemison says. “Not for hostages, not for anything! We do not give this bastard
any
leverage over us.”

Galbraith turns to Santamaria. “Captain.”

“Chief Jemison is right,” he says, not looking at her.

Galbraith's eyes widen. “Captain!”

Santamaria holds up a hand. “We proceed as if Chief Gavilán is still alive. We do our best to minimize any potential danger to her from our actions. But we cannot disregard the safety of four thousand civilians while attempting to rescue a single crewperson.

“Our priority is regaining control of the ship. And we do not negotiate with terrorists. Is that clear?” He looks around the table at all his officers. Most of them nod silently.

Galbraith smacks her palm against the table and clenches it into a fist. “Yes, Captain.”

I know he and Jemison are right. It's everything the agency's ever taught me: no single asset is worth blowing the mission.

Well, I don't seem to be very good at following orders this week.

Why does my brain feel like it's on fire? I've seen people die before. Thousands, if you count the war vids I had to analyze. I've even killed people myself. Why does this feel different? Why am I taking this personally?

Because you've never been this close before.

It's true. I've never been close to those who died, either physically or emotionally. They were either hostiles or associates. Nobody I actually had a personal conversation with.

Nobody who got engaged in the same arboretum where I first kissed Ellie.

And when I had to eliminate a target, it was always at a remove. Drop them in the pocket, push them off a tall building, shoot them from a distance. I never had to watch a human being bleed out right in front of me. I never had to end someone with my bare hands.

I bet I could, though. I would have absolutely no qualms about squeezing the life out of that hijacker's—

“Rogers!”

It's Captain Santamaria. How long has he been trying to get my attention?

“Yes, sir,” I say. “Sorry, sir.”

“Get down there and scan Main Eng,” Santamaria says. “We need to know what he's doing in there.”

*   *   *

Jemison is standing back from main engineering when I arrive. There's a rough semicircle of security guards around the main doors, which have closed on the yellow-and-black safety line. Three engineers in welding gear are huddled right in front of the doors, attempting to cut through. Their torches shoot sparks and cast flickering shadows against the walls.

I pull myself up next to Jemison, gripping a handhold. “Chief.”

“Rogers.” She doesn't look at me. “Give me something.”

“Wait one.”

I've already adjusted my left eye sensors to see through the bulkhead. The lines of electrical force coming off the ionwell are pretty obvious and easy to zero out, leaving three human-shaped interference patterns, dark blots against a glittering golden background.

There's Xiao's body, tumbling free and a slightly different shade because it's cooling from loss of blood. Below him, I see another shape, motionless, stuck to the circular railing around the ionwell.

Ellie. Probably restrained. Still unconscious. I should be seeing interference patterns around her wrist, from her control band's radio, but there's nothing. The hijacker must have smashed it.

And the third shape. The hijacker. “He's on the left side of the room,” I say. “Just standing there. His arms might be moving. Which console is that?”

“Emergency lockout panel,” Jemison says. “Dammit. He knows this ship. He knew where the security camera was. He knows how to move in zero-gee.”

I can hear what she's not saying. Jerry Bartelt was the decoy, and we missed the real threat. Just like we were supposed to.

And now Xiao's dead, and who knows what this hijacker is going to do to the ship.
And Ellie.

“How long before they cut through the door?” I ask.

“Best case, fifteen minutes,” she says.

The hijacker's shape changes, and it takes me a second to interpret what I'm seeing. “He's turning. I can't tell if he's looking in this direction or away from us, but—”

I hear some kind of siren, far away, muffled. Then a grating noise, metal against metal. A dark rectangle moves down, filling my field of view and erasing yellow field lines as it goes.

“Something's happening,” I say. I'm not sure what I'm seeing.

“Goddammit,” Jemison mutters.

Something clangs behind the doors to main engineering, and my left eye goes dark. I blink it a few times, switching modes, to make sure the sensors are still working.

“GODDAMMIT!” Jemison screams, slamming her fist against the wall. She has enough presence of mind to hold herself in place with her other hand, so the force of the blow doesn't send her careening down the corridor. I have enough presence of mind to move out of her way and keep my mouth shut until she's ready to talk.

“He closed the containment bulkhead,” she says. Her voice is hoarse. “They're thicker than the outer hull. No chance of cutting through with less than a pulse laser.” She looks at me. “I don't suppose you keep one in your pocket.”

“No.” I don't feel like explaining right now.

The engineers at the other end of the corridor are cursing, many of them much more colorfully than Jemison. They bang their own fists against the door. Security pulls them back before they hurt themselves or damage their equipment. I wonder if the guards envy them that emotional release.

All I can think about is Xiao's body, drifting there in the room, lifeless and growing cold. The hijacker killed him without hesitation, like it was nothing to take a man's life. What will he do to Ellie when she wakes up? What kinds of threats will he make—and act on—if she doesn't cooperate?

Or will he just kill her, too, and save himself the trouble?

I caught another glimpse of Ellie's shape as I was cycling through the sensing modes in my eye. I don't know what else to do, so I play back the buffer to see her again.

As I'm stepping through the sensor images, one frame at a time, not wanting to miss what might be my last sight of Eleanor Gavilán, I see a flash of color.

“He's military,” I say quietly. “I've got a reading here, a radiation signature. He's got a power implant.”

Jemison says nothing for a moment. Then she whips her entire body around to face me. “What kind of power implant?”

I stare at the HUD floating in my eye, struggling to make sense of the readouts. “Looks like a particle emission capture—”

The last word stops in my throat. I feel my mouth hanging open. Jemison's mouth is closed, her lips pressed together.

“Sickbay,” she says.

*   *   *

Dr. Sawhney is treating some of the engineering crew when we arrive. Jemison doesn't even say hello to him. She flies over to an equipment storage cabinet and flings it open, clattering metal and plastic as she digs through its contents.

“Chief!” Sawhney says, floating over to us. I'm doing my best to catch things as Jemison tosses them out of her way. “Are you injured? What are you looking for?”

Jemison stops for a moment. “The alpha wave generator. The one we found in the Wachlins' stateroom.”

Sawhney gives her a disapproving look, then turns around and opens a different cabinet. He pulls out a clear plastic bag with a metal donut inside. Jemison grabs the bag, tears it open, and turns the device over in her hands.

“Please be careful with that,” Sawhney says, half a second before Jemison rips off the top of the casing. Inside is a mass of wires, circuit boards, and round gray disks. Sawhney sighs.

“What does this look like, Doctor?” Jemison asks.

Sawhney glares at her, then takes the disassembled device and looks at it. After a moment, he frowns and starts poking at it, pushing aside wires to examine other components.

“This is not an alpha wave generator,” he says. “It doesn't even have a power supply. There is a niche here, and connectors, but there's nothing in it.”

“Just the right size for a PECC,” I say.

Sawhney's head snaps up. “Atomic power? Why would this machine need so much energy?”

“It's not a machine,” Jemison says. “It's a shell. They used it to hide the second power core. It looked like a medical device, so port security didn't think twice when it pegged the radiation scanners. David Wachlin had a goddamn prescription.”

“I don't understand,” Sawhney says. There's obvious concern on his face as he looks from Jemison to me and back again. “Why would someone wish to smuggle an atomic power core on board the ship? Is this related to the hijacking?” His face goes pale. “Does the hijacker plan to destroy the ship?”

Jemison's not listening to him. “Alan Wachlin wanted us to think he was dead. So we wouldn't be searching for him. He knew we'd be watching every passenger like a hawk during midway, and he wanted to hide until he was ready to break into Main Eng.”

“He still has his PECC,” I say. “That's what I saw in engineering. He smuggled the other one aboard in this casing, so he could plant it with the dead body we thought was him.”

“Pardon me,” Sawhney says. “If what you're saying is true, and Alan Wachlin is still alive—then who is the person we found in his bed?”