Atrophy (30 page)

“Here. I think I know where we need to start.” He showed Rian what he’d found, and the captain’s already grim expression became arctic as he watched the footage of the woman being ferried inside the little-used entrance of the hospital.

“Let’s get over there.”

Rian revved the car and shot them into the steady stream of traffic leaving the spaceport, still manually driving despite the monsoon-like rain making visibility near impossible.

“It’s not going to be as simple as walking in and taking her.” No, things were never that simple, especially where the Reidar were concerned, as Tannin was quickly coming to learn.

Rian sliced him an impatient look. “I know that. They’ll be expecting me.”

“Not only that, but the lab has restricted access. Like extreme restricted. The security is insane, and they’re listed as handling sensitive and potentially dangerous genetic material.”

“More like Niels needs somewhere to treat his slimy alien buddies and torture people,” Rian muttered. “You can hack it, right? Get us in the door and I’ll take care of the rest.”

He shook his head. “It won’t work, it’s too dangerous. As soon as I get us inside, they could kill Zahli before we can find her.”

Rian shot him an aggravated look and then took a corner too fast, leaving behind a burst of angry beeping. “If you have a better idea, tech-rat, I’m all ears.”

He glared down at the screen, displaying what little, vague information there was available about GenProxy labs. He didn’t want to say it outright, because Rian would probably stab him, but there was pretty much no way anything good would come of Rian going into that lab. They needed stealth. They needed distraction. They needed a legitimate reason to walk through those doors that wouldn’t alert the Reidar to the fact that a rescue was taking place—

The answer hit him like a solar flare, whitewashing all other thoughts from his mind. “I know what we need to do.”

He leaned sideways and pulled his commpad out of his pocket, then set it against the car’s crystal display to link the system.

“Yeah? Well it better be foolproof, and you better be ready, because we’re here.” Rian jerked the car to a stop, taking up two car-spaces on an angle. The captain picked up the DNA Tagger and tapped at the small square screen on the top. As he adjusted the settings, it belatedly occurred to Tannin that without a DNA sample, the thing would be useless.

However the device was already scanning the immediate area. Rian glanced up. Obviously his face was broadcasting his confusion loud and clear, because the captain said, “I have DNA samples of all my crew stored on the
Imojenna’s
systems.”

Tannin nodded a reply, unable to decide if that was a massive invasion of privacy or some kind of psychotic genius.

The DNA tagger chimed and Rian glanced down, muttering a curse. “This thing has confirmed she’s in the building, but it can’t pinpoint a location. They must have some kind of advanced cloaking on the lab.”

The smooth relief that they’d found Zahli ran right into the churning anxiety that she was being held in some kind of Reidar lab, the likes of which had turned Rian into the charming individual he was today. They had to get her out.
Now
.

“I need you to go find me some kind of coat. The more professional looking, the better. And maybe some kind of ID tag.” He didn’t bother glancing up from the screen, pulling information out of his commpad, expanding it and setting it into the car’s comm system.

“Sure. You want a mocha-frappa-wanker-chino with that get-up as well?”

He shot Rian an unimpressed glare, but didn’t let out the string of insults tightening his mouth.

Rian held up a hand. “Fine. But when I get back in two minutes, you better be ready to move on this plan of yours.”

The door slammed and Tannin returned to his work, fingers flying over the crystal screen as he got things ready. True to his word, Rian was gone less than two minutes before he came back with a navy business jacket with a holo-ID card attached to the pocket. A tap revealed the image of an ethnic woman in her late fifties. He glanced up at Rian, who shrugged. “You didn’t say the ID had to be a man. Or look anything like you.”

He snatched the coat and sat forward to flip it around his shoulders. “Great, because this plan wasn’t stupid enough already.”

“What is the plan?” Rian demanded.

“You remember that Reidar virus that almost took us down the first rotation I was onboard the
Imojenna
?” He slid his arms into the jacket, the seams pulling a little tight.

Rian gave a single nod. “What about it?”

Tannin motioned to the screen. “I kept a sample on my commpad, since it was so far beyond anything I’d seen before. I was studying it to see if I could glean anything about Reidar technology.”

“You kept a sample of the virus that almost turned the ship into a floating ice chest?” Rian’s expression went taut, getting a little too close to stabbing-range for his comfort.

“Yes, but it was totally disabled. Don’t worry about that now. The point is, I’ve repurposed it, and I’m about to launch it into GenProxy’s systems. I’ve also arranged to appropriate their comm system, so when they call out for tech support, I’ll take the call. Then it’s a matter of walking through the doors and pretending I’m going to look at their servers.”

Rian’s expression altered the slightest bit, almost like he was…impressed? Nah, he must have been imagining things.

“Okay, let’s get to it then.” Rian pulled out a nucleon gun and checked the power pack. “I’ve got ammo with names on it for every one of the bastards inside that place.”

“You can’t come.” He snapped his mouth closed after he said the words, Rian glancing up, his eyes glacial. Okay, maybe he could have laid that out more diplomatically.

“What do you mean I
can’t
come?”

“Think about it. Niels wants Ella, but you said yourself, the Reidar have been trying to kill you for years. If you go in there with me, you might blow my cover and we end up with the same result—Zahli dead before we can reach her.”

Rian stared at him in icy, stony silence for a long moment. Goddamnit. He didn’t want to fight the man on this, but he would. He’d do anything to save Zahli, even take on her psychopathic brother if it meant saving her.

With a slow movement, Rian handed over the nucleon gun. “Take this.”

He blew out the breath that’d jammed up in his lungs. “Thanks. Don’t worry, I’ll get Zahli out.”

Rian crossed his arms. “And if you don’t, you can use that to shoot yourself with. Save me the trouble.”

He paused, taking in Rian’s usual unemotional countenance, unable to tell if that had been a joke or he was totally serious.

“If I’m not back in twenty minutes, feel free to go with Plan B and shoot your way inside.”

Rian didn’t answer as Tannin tabbed the crystal screen to launch the virus into GenProxy’s systems. Hacked in, he watched as everything in the lab failed in an almost poetic cascade of computers and equipment going offline. It only took a short few minutes for someone to put a call out to their usual tech-support company, which he intercepted and answered.

“Okay, I’m going in.” He pushed open the car door, anxious anticipation washing over him in chilled waves.

“And make sure you kill at least a couple of the frecking aliens.”

He slammed the door on Rian’s parting order, adjusting the coat, which was a size too small, and turning the holo-ID badge around so it was facing in. Hopefully they wouldn’t ask to see it. If they did, he’d just have to take a leaf out of Rian’s playbook and put a few aliens down.

He hurried through the rain, which had eased off into a heavy drizzle, and entered one of the hospital’s side entrances. The GenProxy lab was one of twenty sub-basement levels, so he had to go down on a crowded elevator. When he stepped out on the lab’s floor, there was nothing to see but a small blank room and a guard sitting behind a desk.

“I’m here about the system failure,” he said before the guard could ask. The man swept a brief glance over him.

“I’ll comm someone to take you to the server room.”

He nodded, while on the inside he tightened with frustration. If he had an escort take him to the server room, how in the fiery pits of Erebus was he supposed to sneak off and find Zahli?

After a silent few moments in which the guard stared at him and didn’t try to make small talk, while he did everything in his power to look bored and not fidget, a door to the left of the guard’s station opened and a woman in a white lab coat stepped out.

“This way, please. We need this problem fixed as soon as possible. Some of our genetic material is in danger of being compromised, because the backup system isn’t working either.”

“Of course,” he managed to say with the right amount of gravity, locking down the urge to grin. Payback was a bitch—in this case, a viral bitch of their own design.

He followed the woman into a hallway, which was a lot nicer than the guardroom outside. The corridor was wide, in some places lined with chairs on the outer-partition side of consulting rooms, waiting rooms, and treatment rooms, looking more like a hospital or surgery for the ultra-rich, rather than the lab as it was listed on the hospital’s directory. And there seemed to be any number of doctors, nurses, and patients around. Were they human? Or was every single one of them a shape shifting alien, and this was one of their treatment centers like Rian had said? It would make sense for them to have their own doctors and hospitals. When they got injured—or he presumed they got sick sometimes—they couldn’t exactly go to a normal hospital or someone would have worked out by now humans weren’t alone in this universe.

The woman led him to what seemed like the far end of the sub-level and then pushed open a door. “This is our main server room, but we have a small secondary one on the other side of this level.”

He stepped through the doorway, passing a quick glance around the space, which looked totally normal and in no way screamed “alien torture lab.”

Unfortunately, the woman also stepped inside and sat down in a seat just inside the doorway, not looking like she planned on going anywhere as he approached a bank of crystal display screens.

“This might take a while, so if you’ve got something else you need to be doing—”

“I have to be here.” The woman didn’t look up from the commpad she had in her hand, scrolling through whatever was on her screen.

“Okay,” he muttered, positioning himself at a screen she wouldn’t be able to see from where she sat.

He’d left himself a backdoor into the virus so he could get in and navigate the systems while they still appeared to be down.

Unfortunately, the first thing he came across was a security warning.
Frecking hell
. As soon as he’d stepped into the hospital, a facial scan had picked up his status as a wanted criminal. It wouldn’t take the IPC authorities long to get to the hospital and work out where he’d gone. At least with the systems down, the guard at the front desk on this level didn’t have a clue.

But it meant he had a lot less than the twenty minutes he’d told Rian. He couldn’t deal with the issue now; he had to find Zahli. The last thing he wanted was to end up back on Erebus, but if that was the difference between seeing Zahli safe or losing her for good, then he’d go back to that hell in a heartbeat.

Disregarding the security alert, he dove into the files, looking for any clue of Zahli. None of the folders or information had names on them, simply either “patient” or “subject” with a designation of mixed numbers and letters. There were eight new entries from the last twelve hours, six patients and two subjects. With no other lead, he took note of the room and lab numbers. Now somehow, he had to lose his escort. Rian had given him a nucleon gun, not a pulse pistol. He could have used something to knock her out with, because for all he knew, she was human. And he couldn’t shoot her in cold blood, even though she was the single thing standing between him and finding Zahli.

“I’m going to need to see that other server room.”

The woman glanced up from her commpad, a faintly annoyed expression crossing her features.

He stepped out from behind the bank of screens and joined her as she opened the door. The security system was down like everything else, but the door locks were a bit like the ones used on Erebus. With his window into the virus, they shouldn’t take much to scramble.

He half-stepped in front of the woman and she glanced up in surprise, shuffling back a little.

“Sorry about this,” he muttered a second before he shoved her square in the middle of the chest and sent her stumbling back. He slammed the door closed and held it there while he accessed the controls with the other hand. The woman banged, shouting angrily, however the door—which probably doubled as a blast panel—was so thick the sound was muffled. Still, he glanced up and down the hallway to make sure he hadn’t attracted any attention to himself as he finished jumbling the door security and once it had locked down, stepped back.

Getting his bearings, he set off along the corridor, walking quickly and hoping he didn’t come across anyone who would want to know what he was doing. In a matter of minutes, he’d checked three of the rooms and found them occupied with patients—none of them Zahli. He came across one of the two labs he’d wanted to check and had to stop short as a man in a white coat stepped out. He ducked out of sight into the nearest room, the patient luckily either asleep or unconscious.

The man stopped midway down the opposite corridor to have a short conversation on his commpad, though Tannin couldn’t hear what the doctor was saying. After too many long, impatient seconds, where he spent resisting the urge to use Rian’s nucleon gun after all, the man moved on and Tannin hurried out and down to the lab.

He yanked open and door and rushed in, sure he wouldn’t find her. A jolt of relief and consternation cut off his breath because Zahli sat on the bare floor in the middle of the room.

“Tannin!” Her eyes widened when she saw him, her face pale and expression drawn.

He started forward, but Zahli held out both hands. “No, wait!”