Blaedergil's Host by C.M. Simpson (reading well .TXT) 📕

Mack hadn’t been impressed.

“You don’t trust us?” he’d asked, and she’d shaken her head.

“I trust you to get the job done. It’s the rest of Odyssey you have to convince... or did you think Cutter was the only problem?”

Mack had gone very quiet at that, and Tens had looked worried. Pritchard had watched the exchange in his usual silent fashion, and added not a word. I wondered at that, but didn’t ask. I was guessing there were some things I just didn’t want to know. Delight’s voice brought me back to the present.

“You need to get the door, Cutter—and be quick. I don’t want to have to take anyone apart just yet. That would completely stuff any hope of stealth we might have been counting on.”

I didn’t question her, just sidestepped clumsily to reach the door, and then removed the gloves, tucking them into the waist band of the suit. Door didn’t take long. I just had to ride through the connections I’d already made into the security system, and hit a couple of buttons, and we were through—and none-too-soon, it seemed.

“Were those footsteps?” I asked, as Delight slipped past me, and I closed and locked the door behind us.

“No time for chit-chat,” she answered stripping out of the EVA suit and dumping it in a clear space in the center of the floor. “We set an alarm off on the outer hatch, and they’ll come here as soon as they’ve checked that.”

I got out of the suit in record-quick time, and dumped it beside the rapidly disintegrating mess that had been hers. The dust chomping nanites finished on hers, and started on mine, before I’d even applied my vial, and I had a thought.

While Delight cleared the way into the vents, I pulled out a vac extension, and blinded the security and maintenance systems to its usage.

“How long do these critters live for?” I asked.

“Maybe thirty seconds. No longer,” Delight answered, setting the access panel for the ventilation shaft to one side. “Why?”

And then she saw the vac extension in my hands.

“Oh.”

I really hoped that was not an ‘oh’ that meant she’d forgotten something important, like her dust-chompers were going to eat their way through the space-station hull.

“Nope, should be fine,” she said, and turned back to the vent.

There was something... ‘not right’ about her answer, but I didn’t have time to chase her for the truth. I could only hope I wasn’t about to destroy something important as I vacuumed the remains of our EVA suits into the station’s waste disposal system. I accessed the security cams to keep an eye on the corridor outside, and hastily followed Delight into the vents, stopping to pull the cover back in place once we were in.

“So, we’re really not coming back this way, right?”

“Right,” she said, “but we’re not going to get very far if you keep talking it to death.”

She made a good point, so I shut my mouth, and followed her into the safety-lit shaft, although why the damn thing was big enough for us to crawl along was beyond me.

“You should read more history,” she said. “The smaller ducts were good for reducing human incursions, but there were a hundred different other things that got in and needed human intervention to remove, and the small ducts created more problems than they solved. This size was a good compromise, especially once security measures were adopted that could deal with anything big that got in.”

“Like that?” I asked, as a sound I remembered from her footage reached our ears.

“That’s a problem,” Delight said. “There’s a vent two feet behind you. Get it open, and get through it, and don’t bother with subtle. We’re blown.”

Great. We hadn’t even reached the first lab, and our mission was a bust. I wondered what Mack was going to say to that.

To my surprise, though, my abrupt entry into the passage just inside the Corovan pharma’s walls, wasn’t met with outcry and screams for Security. In fact, it was downright eerie. If something hadn’t gone very, very wrong, down here, I was in the quietest laboratory complex in existence. So much for stripping out of the combat suit to blend in with the civilians; I was keeping the damn thing on.

“Cutter, we have a problem,” Mack commed in, just as Delight dropped down beside me.

She was reaching for the cover to the ventilation shaft, when she froze, scanning the corridor.

“We need to be somewhere else,” she said, drawing a Glazer from one of her pouches and running for the nearest door.

I ran, too. I hadn’t been able to hear what she had, but I could now, and my skin was crawling with unseen fingers. That sound, low and agony-filled, curled up the back of my neck and trembled across my scalp. I shuddered. The last time I’d heard that, I’d been running for my life through Blaedergil’s mansion.

“We’ve got a problem, here, too, Mack,” I sent. I wanted to scroll through the security footage to see exactly what was coming our way. I’d been intending to do it, once we were closer to the lab, hadn’t thought I’d need to do it, sooner.

I remembered the visuals from the day before. The pharma’s security footage was linked to the station’s security system, something I figured Corovan wasn’t aware of. I wondered if any of its other security systems were similarly slaved. The only problem was that I was going to have to stop to work it out.

Delight hit the door, and turned the handle before I could stop her. Damn, now I couldn’t check to see if what was on the other side, might be worse than what was on this one. I hesitated, but Delight reached back, and hauled me through, slamming the door shut behind us.

“Get it locked!”

I followed my theory, moving from the cams to the other security systems, and finding the security for the doors. I liked this security company, very logical—it