The Belt, page 19
“I like being prepared,” Leah told him. “You never know who you’re going to run into out here.”
A woman appeared in the passageway to her left. “Ain’t that the truth,” she said. Another step, and the light revealed her to be as black as Leah’s captor. She wore the same manner of dark green jumpsuit but with a white bandana tied about her head. Leah thought they had met once, long ago, but she couldn’t quite place the face. It was older now, worn by hardship. Those dark eyes were harder than any she had ever seen, yet humor lurked behind them.
The woman waved the man off. He holstered his weapon and stood back without relaxing his guard. “I’m Mudiwa,” she said. “I’m the boss. And you are?”
“Carla Livingstone,” Leah said. “From Lunae Planum.”
Mudiwa wagged a finger. “Na, na, na. You’re Leah Leaf, from Lowell Colony. You tortured me nine years ago.”
“Wasn’t me,” Leah objected, although it could have been. She’d been a senior interrogator then. “I never heard of anyone named Mudiwa.”
“Oh, I changed my name, baby. And you’re a big, big girl now, soon to be commander of Schiaparelli Security. Putting people through hell really worked out for you, didn’t it?”
“I don’t know you,” Leah repeated. “I’m from Lunae Planum.”
Mudiwa squatted in front of her and stared into her eyes. “Question is, what the hell you doing out here?” Her eyes widened in mock surprised. “Oh, oh, oh! I know!” She looked over her shoulder. “Oh, Jimmy, I know what she wants! She wants that scientist, that Hernandez fellow. Of course!” She stood and laughed at Leah. “Oh, baby, you’re in for a big surprise. He’s gone. Poof!” She spread her fingers. “Like a ghost. Not that I have any use for him, but I do listen. I do hear things. Trackers vanish when they go after him. Also like ghosts. Mars eats them alive.”
Theatrics and wild stories about her missing trackers didn’t interest Leah. Only one thing did, so she dropped the pretense. “Mayor Rand will pay to get me back. Name your price.”
“See, Jimmy? She is so Leah Leaf from Lowell. No, Leah. Rand can’t pay my price. You tortured me. Those nasty little nanobots are still in my body. But I’ve made peace with them. I’ve been saving them for the day I could share them with you. And sweetie, that day has come.”
Not if she could help it. She got to her feet, keeping her eyes on Mudiwa’s. “You’ve been hiding in this rock for nine years, waiting for me to blunder by?”
Mudiwa waggled her hand. “Mmmm. Doing odd jobs. A little smuggling, a little mercenary work. I finally landed a big, big contract. Huge. Hugest ever. I’ll be set for life. You blundering by was a bonus, Leah. Oh, I’m going to enjoy this.”
Leah laughed at her. “You’re mad. What big contracts ever come to Mars?”
“You don’t know? I thought you of all people had to know.”
“I know about Schiaparelli, but that’s hardly something you’d be involved with.”
“In a roundabout way, I am,” Mudiwa said. “Celia Fundichely is bankrolling Schiaparelli, and I’m here for Celia.” She made a gun with her fingers and play-shot Leah in the forehead.
Which made no sense. No way would Celia Fundichely set foot on Mars. She hid in the shadows of the Belt. People said nobody ever saw her, not even her closest advisors.
“Now come.” Mudiwa motioned Jimmy over. He trained the gun on Leah again while Mudiwa indicated the passageway from which she had entered. “This way. You and I are going to play.”
Alejandro tracked Miguel’s rover to here, a small spaceport inexplicably sited in Lunae Planum where nobody was supposed to be. Jake hadn’t contributed much to the mission so far, but when they found the spaceport, anger consumed him. “This is where the settlers are killed,” he growled. “I tears it down with my bare hands.”
“Not now, Jake,” Alejandro cautioned. “An operation like that will be heavy on security.”
He monitored for a time. The spaceport sent few signals, and the only movement was the launch of a suborbital capsule. Alejandro pulled up a projected trajectory on the rover’s panel. The capsule was making for Utopia, a strange destination given that nothing was there. Then again, nothing was supposed to be here, either. He had two options: search this place for Miguel, or assume he was on that ship. He asked Jake for an opinion but got only a grunt in reply.
“I say we follow,” Alejandro suggested.
“Why?” Jake asked.
“Miguel needs to hide. Utopia would be one great hiding place.” He fiddled with the scanners. “There’s another suborbital at the far end of the field. I can pilot, assuming they don’t have remote overrides. If Miguel’s not in Utopia, we come back here.” He transferred the departed ship’s trajectory to his personal panel.
Jake rose. “And I kills anyone who gets in the way.”
Alejandro preferred not to be conspicuous, but if Jake meant it, there would be no stopping him. Clearly, he saw a connection between this facility and the murdered settlers, who in turn reminded him of Mlada. The settlers had died about a year ago, according to Nessa O’Clery. They must have been taken out to make way for construction and maybe as a warning to others to keep their distance.
“We’ll walk in,” Alejandro decided. “Less chance of being spotted. Small arms. If anyone asks, we’re maintenance.”
They left the rover behind a cluster of boulders seven tenths of a kilometer from their target and made their way across the broken ground to the tarmac, veering north to put the ship between themselves and the spaceport buildings. The tack worked. Nobody rushed to stop them, at any rate. In under ten minutes, they made the ship’s boarding hatch and passed through the airlock. The passenger cabin sat empty and darkened. Alejandro removed his helmet and listened. No sound from the crew compartment. Waving for Jake to follow, he moved forward.
They had just reached the flight controls when from behind someone called, “Hey!”
Alejandro turned, but Jake had already delivered a savage uppercut to the intruder’s jaw, which sent the man flying in the weak gravity. He crashed against the rear bulkhead with Jake already on him, hands about his neck, crushing his throat. A moment later, Jake stuffed the body into the airlock.
“Not here,” Alejandro warned. “Jettison him once we’re in flight.”
“Fine,” Jake said. He lumbered into the crew compartment and dropped into the co-pilot seat. “You say you can flies this thing.”
Taking the pilot chair, Alejandro nodded. He uploaded the trajectory from his panel to the capsule’s system and set for takeoff. Minutes later, they were airborne, and minutes after that, a familiar voice intruded over a suddenly open comm channel.
“Hello, Alejandro. You surprise me. Why are you not in a comfortable bed on Vegas station, surrounded by expensive women?”
He gaped at the panel.
Jake eyed him suspiciously. “Who’s that?”
“The environmentalist,” he said.
“Who?”
“My boss.”
“Alejandro does not know my name, Jake,” the woman said, her voice silk. “Where are you taking my ship, Alejandro?”
How they hell had she known who Jake was? “I’m—looking for someone.”
“Your brother, perhaps?”
Again, how had she known? Somehow, she knew everything. No wonder Alejandro could never outmaneuver her.
“You will find him in Utopia,” she assured him. “And you have my blessing. But I require one thing.”
“Just one?”
“When you are done, bring my ship back.”
Her ship? What was going on? “Understood,” he said.
“Who,” Jake insisted, “are you?”
“I am Hitomi,” the environmentalist replied. “We shall soon meet.”
The comm channel went dead.
“Nice lady,” Jake said.
Alejandro grimaced. “Not really. She’s twisty.”
Jake grinned. “Like us?”
“Not at all. We’re as straight as it gets.”
The ship reached apogee and began its descent toward Utopia. Jake sauntered to the airlock to dump the body.
Chapter 18
Sleek as a panther, grinning like she’d won a jackpot, Mudiwa displayed a hypo of clear liquid. Sunlight streaming through a crystal-covered crack in the rock overhead sparkled in the substance. “My, my, it’s such a beauty, isn’t it?” she said. “You’ll never guess how I got it.”
Subcommander Leah didn’t know what it was, much less how Mudiwa acquired it. Stripped naked, she was strapped to a smooth rock table through which seeped the Martian cold. It chilled her flesh. The man Mudiwa called Jimmy stood by the wall, eyeing Leah with contempt or lust or both.
“A doctor in the Belt was experimenting with these babies. Putting them into people, pulling them out of people. After you got done with me, I stowed away on a freighter. They caught me and threw me into a mine on a slave gang. This doctor found out you’d shot me full of nanobots. Really turned him on. He bought me and gave me a starring role in his experiments.”
Mudiwa lowered the hypo and play-punched Leah in the shoulder. “God, did that scramble my brains. Later, he told me he’d extracted half the bastards and put them in a vial. I don’t know why. Some technical gibberish. Then he went at me again, to see how effective half the load could be. Care to know?”
“Not really,” Leah said. She tugged at the restraints, but they had no weakness, offered no way out.
“Baby, let me tell you. It hit a new high in psycho. My doctor friend was astounded, but not half as astounded as when I stabbed him through the heart with his own scalpel.” She laughed again. “And now, thanks to him, I have these. Or should I say, you have them.”
None too gently, she injected the fluid into Leah’s side. Leah grimaced but refused to make a sound.
“Now,” Mudiwa said. “We’ll give them a few minutes, then we’ll chat with them.” She held up a black box like those Lowell Security used in interrogations. “It’ll be fun. For me. Hell for you, I should think.”
Leah figured she could handle it. If Mudiwa could, if Hernandez’s students could, she certainly could. Meanwhile, she could do some work. “You have a vendetta against Celia Fundichely, too?”
“No, girl, that’s just a job. A sweet job, though. Two, in fact. Celia’s coming to Utopia. When she does, I get to do what I do best.”
“Kill her,” Leah suggested.
“Oh, yeah.” Mudiwa made a gun with her fingers and play-shot Leah between the eyes. “Then I get a new life. I become Celia Fundichely. Isn’t that great? I’ll be the richest bitch in the cosmos!” She spread her arms and twirled.
“A trained bitch on a short leash.”
“I’m fine with that.”
“Yeah? Who’s holding it?”
Mudiwa waggled a finger. “Ah, ah, ah. That’s a secret.”
Leah switched gears. “What if you kill the wrong woman? Nobody knows what Celia Fundichely looks like.”
“That’s the best part. They say she looks like me!”
Leah couldn’t help it. She laughed. “And you believed them?”
Mudiwa laughed with her. “For that kind of money, you’re damn right I believed. Don’t be jealous. I’m sharing the wealth. You get some of my torture bots. And when we’re all done, Jimmy gets you. He’s been such a patient boy.” She turned and winked at Jimmy, who grinned back.
“Scramble my brains if you want,” Leah warned, “but if he so much as drools on me, you’re both dead.”
Mudiwa waggled the black box at Leah. “Ooo, big talk from someone so immobilized.” She tapped the device.
A supernova exploded in Leah’s head. Spinning through its heat and brilliance, she tumbled in space until she dove headlong into another sun that seared her retinas and set her body aflame. She could smell her own flesh vaporize as the blaze fragmented into a garish spectrum while a dragon roared in her ears. Oxygen was ripped from her lungs, then she plummeted into a frozen ocean. Encased in ice, frigid water filling her throat, she tried to scream, and the sound was like all the symphonies ever composed battling to be heard. Something caught her in a tight embrace and turned her agony to a pleasure so intense there was no difference. Eyes shut tight, she saw the universe pulse with radiation. Wave after wave of pleasure-pain crashed upon her until her lover and tormentor released her and a great emptiness filled her. She groped for something, anything, to hold to. She found something, though she knew not what. Her fingers sank into it and tore it to shreds while a scream echoed through her, a scream not formed in her own throat.
At the end of eternity, the nightmare dissolved into darkness and silence. Her limbs quivered. Her hands were covered in warm, sticky fluid. Vision returned like a curtain rising on a darkened stage. The lights came up, revealing but one actor.
Leah herself.
She crouched naked on the stone floor, gasping as the world reformed around her. What she saw made as little sense as the hallucinations: she was hunched over Jimmy’s twisted body, his throat ripped open, her hands bathed in his blood.
“What the hell,” she muttered. She clawed her way to her feet, leaned on the stone table, shook with cold, confusion, fear. She was alone with the corpse. The other woman, Mudiwa. Where was she? Had she even been there?
Yes, she had. The black box lie smashed on the table. Leah picked at the fragments as though she might reassemble it. Shredded remains of the restraints encircled her wrists and ankles. She sat on the table, tugged them off, and used them to clean the blood from her hands.
Where were her clothes? She hopped down and located them in a haphazard pile in the corner along with her envirosuit. Only her helmet was missing. She gathered everything up and returned to the table to dress. Her side felt sore. She probed her abused flesh, trying to think, trying to remember. There had been talk. A medical procedure. An injection.
Nanobots.
Hell, Mudiwa must have activated them at one hundred percent. Nobody did that, not unless the subject was slated for death. Only Leah hadn’t died, maybe because she only received a partial load of nanobots. Mudiwa had said something about that, something about experiments. Whatever the reason, Leah turned berserker, tore free of the restraints, and killed Jimmy with her bare hands. Either Mudiwa had fled, or she had left Leah in Jimmy’s charge before the torture climaxed.
Something struck her as funny, and she laughed before realizing what it was: Jimmy got to play with her after all, just not the way he wanted.
Where had Mudiwa gone? Leah remembered something. A fragment of conversation. A single word: Utopia. Mudiwa must have gone to Utopia.
Leah finished dressing and began to explore the cave.
They almost got out unnoticed. Randall ate at the table near the front, his back to Quan Linh and Ricard Fulbert, showing no interest in his surroundings. When done, he made for the door, leaving a tableful of trash for someone else to clean up. Pausing by the exit, he turned as though he’d forgotten something and saw them. Now he was looming over them, hands on hips, eyes ablaze. “You’re jumping ship,” he accused. “You’re trying to cheat me.”
“No,” Linh objected. “We were coming back. We just needed to get out for a while.”
“Liar. You’re coming with me. Now.” He grabbed for her wrist, but she jerked her hand away as a wave of panic washed over her.
Ricard put an arm about her and drew her to his side. “Breathe,” he whispered. To Randall, he said, “Leave her alone.”
“I covered for you, damn it, and she promised me sex. That was the bargain.”
Ricard rose. Ten centimeters taller than Randall, he looked down on his adversary. “Leave.”
Linh hugged herself and took a few deep breaths. She couldn’t let the men fight. Not here. If someone called security, she and Ricard would be dumped back into the mines. But how to get rid of Randall? She could think of only one feint. It required him to be dumber than he probably was, but it was all she had. “Wait,” she said. “It’s okay. I’ll do it. But not on the ship. I can’t stand that junkpile. Find us a room.”
Randall grimaced. “I’m not paying for a room.”
“We’ll pay. Just find us a place. I’ll wait here while you look.”
“Linh,” Ricard said. “No.”
Why did he always take things so literally? Why couldn’t he see what she was doing? “It’s okay,” she repeated. “Go on, find us a room.”
“Like hell,” Randall said. “You’re coming with me.”
Linh shuddered. He wasn’t that stupid after all.
Ricard stood his ground. “We aren’t doing this.”
“You’re too possessive,” Randall said. “I’ll give her back.”
Putting a hand on Ricard’s arm, Linh rose. “It’s okay.”
He did a double take and finally got it. “Fine. But I’m coming with you. To make sure he does give you back.”
Randall smirked and led them to a dim section of the station where temporary quarters were available for cheap rent. He waited while Ricard operated the automated rental kiosk and used some of his gambling winnings to secure a room. A palm print was required to program the door. Randall pushed Ricard aside and slapped his hand on the reader. “So you can’t interrupt,” he said.
Once they located the room, Randall palmed the door open and pushed Linh through. Inside, the place was a dump. The walls were scarred and the furniture barely holding together. Linh wondered if she could break off a chair arm and use it as a weapon.
Before Randall could close the door, Ricard pushed through. He took up position against the wall, arms crossed over his chest, a murderous glint in his eyes.
“Decided to watch?” Randall asked.
“Making sure you don’t get rough.”
