Flying the Storm (33 page)

Security Exception
.

Over and over and over.

Solomon stood for a moment, considering the panel. “Well, this wasn’t us at least…” he murmured, before tapping at buttons on the screen. Aiden tried to catch a look over Solomon’s shoulder, but he’d hidden it too well.

After a few moments the door hissed open, sliding upwards like the other one.
Beyond was darkness. Again, Solomon strode into it without wasting any time. The blue lights came on in the corridor beyond, and as Vika and Aiden followed the chamber behind them darkened.

It was stuffy in there. Warm and unpleasant-smelling… like
an old subway tunnel. It reminded Aiden suddenly that he was inside a mountain. The smell and the warmth and the weight of all the rock above him were telling him that this was somewhere he did not want to be. But he followed Solomon’s lead and hurried after him, his ears straining past the sound of their footsteps to listen for anything that might indicate marines… or anything else that might be lurking in the depths.

The corridor began to spiral, following a big, wide corkscrew down deeper into the mountain.
Solomon was almost jogging now, and Aiden was struggling to keep up. Vika’s legs were slightly shorter, so she was already more or less at a run next to him. He glanced over at her, noting how set her face was. She looked determined, her jaw set and her eyes almost glowing green. Looking at her then, he couldn’t imagine a face more perfect. She seemed more beautiful every time he saw her.

That wasn’t bloody fair.

And then they really were running. It started with Solomon, but the others fell into step almost immediately. It was a strange feeling as they pounded along the stone corridors, legs pumping. Aiden let the pace carry him. He forgot his misgivings. They were a pack then: a wolf-pack of three.

Suddenly there were more doors in front of them.
All were closed. Solomon halted and flicked his head this way and that, looking at each in turn.

“If in doubt…” he said quietly, approaching the middle door.
A press of a button and it slid open. There was a wash of stale, warm air. The smell was worse down here, but after the run Aiden had no choice except to pant it in. Solomon, he noticed, was not breathing any more heavily than before.

This tunnel twisted and turned infuriatingly.
A few closed doors led off to the sides, but Solomon didn’t pay any more than a passing glance to them. With each turn, more blue lights came on, and the ones behind went out. It was a little unnerving and creepy. Energy efficient, though. Aiden supposed this place had to be, for the batteries to have lasted twenty years.

The corridor went straight all of a sudden.
The blue lights flicked on. At the end was very definitely a body. Almost as one, the three pistols were raised. They advanced slowly along the corridor to where the corpse lay face-down by another door. The floor was scuffed in places with shallow gouges, ruining the polished surface. Bullet impacts.

Solomon squatted down by its side.
The body had been dead for some time. The pool of blood under its head was dry and brown. Aiden wondered if the corpse was the source of the bad smell. Big, crusted holes gaped in its back. Solomon pinched the body’s shoulder patch, pulling it upwards a little to show Aiden and Vika.

Two badges.
One the stars of the NAU, one that said
NAUS
Gilgamesh
.

Nobody said a word.

Solomon dialled the door open. Immediately the stench worsened. As they stepped into the next corridor and the lights came on, they spotted more bodies at the end. From a distance, they didn’t look quite right. The proportions were wrong.

Closer up, he saw that they were mutilated.

For whatever reason, they had been blasted to pieces with large-calibre bullets. The wounds were not unlike those the
Iolaire
’s gun had inflicted on the bandits in Georgia. The head of the body propped against the wall was gone, mostly. Its stomach was swollen and burst, and the floor was stained black.
That
was where the stench was coming from, Aiden realised. He fought back a heave.
What did this
?

The monitor by the door was flashing.
Security Exception
. Over and over and over.

Glancing back the way they’d came, he noticed the lights in the previous corridor hadn’t gone out yet.
That was odd.
Maybe the corpse is keeping them on
.

As he turned his head away, though, he could have sworn he caught some movement.
Just at the crack of the doorway. He shivered. It was probably his imagination, he half-convinced himself.

He made himself edge around the bo
dies and the black stain, to where Solomon and Vika were standing by the monitor. Vika held one of her sleeves across her mouth and nose, but Solomon seemed unaffected. He was engrossed in whatever he was doing on the screen.

“Somebody screwed up here,” he said, tapping away. “This is where the exception was triggered.”

No shit
, thought Aiden, eyeing the shredded corpses behind him.

“What…what did this?” asked Vika
, her words muffled by her sleeve.

Solomon pointed above the door then, not even looking from the screen.
“Automated turrets,” he replied. “They fold out of the wall.”

Solomon seemed
to know a lot about this place for somebody who wasn’t sure what he was looking for just ten minutes ago. He’d been an engineer, he said, for the Union. Maybe this sort of thing was standard issue for top-secret factories.

Brutal
.

“Think you can get in?” said Aiden, trying
not to open his mouth too widely.

Solomon said nothing for a moment.
“I think I can, yes.”

“Well, you know, quicker the better,” muttered Aiden, taking a leaf from Vika’s book and using his sleeve as a mask.

It seemed like forever before the door opened, standing in the silent, stinking tunnel with the dead men. But it did open, and beyond lay another corridor. It was short and straight this time, and beyond it Aiden could only see a black void.

Solomon was grinning.
He set off almost at a run along the corridor, unafraid of the darkness at the other end. Vika and Aiden followed him, and the door stayed open behind them. That was good since Aiden didn’t like having his route out blocked.

The corridor ended at a metal walkway, beyond the railing of which nothing could be seen. From the lingering echoes of their footsteps on the metal grill, the chamber sounded huge.
It was darker than Aiden thought possible, and the weak blue light from the corridor did nothing to push it back, seeming to stop short at the railing.

Solomon was tapping away at another wall-mounted monitor.
Vika, pistol still held in front of her, gingerly stepped over to the railing and peered into the darkness. Aiden tried it himself, but he didn’t like the feeling. It was like an abyss out there, waiting to pull him over the edge. He shuddered.

“Let there be light,” said Solomon triumphantly, and just as he did the chamber flickered into startlingly bright shape, from huge strips of lights
set in the high stone ceiling.

The chamber was even
vaster than it had sounded. It stretched easily three hundred metres to its far end, where a huge set of rolling doors stood, but it was what lay in the middle of the chamber that drew Aiden’s gaze.

There, propped on massive struts, was the
Enkidu
.

It was gigantic.
Not anywhere near as large as the
Gilgamesh
, but still impressively huge: it was easily half as long as the chamber, and a third as wide. The gantry that Aiden was standing on must have been fifty metres at least from the floor, but even then the
Enkidu
was a good few tens of metres taller than them. Its prow was sharpened, streamlined and faceted, and it gave the impression of some great beast of the sea; a leviathan or some monstrous whale. Just below the prow were two great holes cut in the skin of the craft.
Railguns
, Aiden knew. Their calibre must have been half a metre.

He realised he was gaping, and snapped his mouth closed.

Solomon gave a short laugh, and raised his arms out to the sides, as if basking in the huge machine’s presence. Vika was just as awestruck as Aiden had been, her pistol hanging almost forgotten by her side.

“She is
beautiful
,” exclaimed Solomon, letting his hands drop. “My god.”

Huge robotic arms were mounted to the walls and ceiling of the chamber.
Each carried a range of smaller ones at its end, and all were folded back from the warship. Aiden realised then that one of the reasons no one had ever heard of the
Enkidu
was that it had been built almost entirely without people. At most, this place would only need a handful of engineers or overseers making sure the robots did their work correctly. It was possible that humans weren’t even involved in maintaining the robots: that could all be done with
other
robots. If he was going to build a top-secret stealth warship; that would be how Aiden wanted it done.

He was looking along the wal
kway, where to one side of the
Enkidu
it turned into a gangway that led aboard, when he noticed Solomon was facing him. The man was holding his big pistol out, pointing it casually at him.

“What…” Aiden started.

“I’m afraid this is as far as you go,” Solomon said. “Vika, could you kindly take the pistol from his pocket?”

Vika came forward then and fished the little silver pistol from Aiden’s baggy trousers.
Her face was deadpan. She showed no emotions.

She was in on it
.

“Well do it then,” hissed Aiden through clenched teeth.
“Pull the bloody trigger.”

Solomon laughed.
“Why? You are no threat, not now. You served your purpose, body-guarding us from any nasty marines. But now, you have done what you came to do. You have seen the
Enkidu
. Please leave.”

Leave
. Why was he telling him to leave? What difference did it make if he was there or not?

“Why?”

“Because the
Enkidu
is mine, Aiden. I can’t have you meddling and ruining things. Go back, now.”

Then it dawned on Aiden.
He wasn’t taking the
Enkidu
to go after the
Gilgamesh
. He was taking it for himself. It could be piloted by one man, he’d said. One man could wield all that power.

And Fredrick and Aiden had just handed it to him.

“All you said about destroying the
Gilgamesh
, it was all bullshit.”

“Not all bullshit, no.
The
Enkidu
could certainly kill the
Gilgamesh
… but the two will never meet. This is too great an opportunity to risk on some fool’s mission. You can tell Teimuraz that he has my thanks. He won’t be seeing me again.”

“And you, Vika?
” demanded Aiden. “You’re with him?”

“Get out, Aiden,” warned
Solomon, “before I lose my patience.”

The only expression Vika showed was a little
scorning raise of her eyebrows, like she was looking at a fool.

That made Aiden very angry.
He was fighting to control himself. He wanted to snatch the big gun from Solomon’s hand and smash their smug faces to pulp with it.

Instead, he took a breath and backed out of the chamber, alon
g the corridor to the dead men’s tunnel. Solomon kept the gun trained on him the whole way back and thumbed the wall monitor to close the door on Aiden.

The last thing Aiden saw of Solomon was a little sarcastic wave, with Vika standing infuriatingly by his side.
She was still beautiful; still achingly perfect. But now Aiden knew she was a harpy. A she-devil.

A traitorous bitch
.

The door slid closed and locked tight, and Aiden was alone with the corpses and the stink.

He stood there, fuming at what had just happened. He couldn’t quite process it. He had just let a second
Gilgamesh
loose on the world.

T
he bastard hadn’t even paid them fully. Aiden shouted a curse at the ceiling.

And suddenly he wasn’t alone in the tunnel any more.
A creeping feeling at his back told him that. He spun on his heels, ready to fight.

There was a person standing timidly, just beyond the farthest corpse.

It was a boy, no older than fourteen, and small for that.
Small and skinny. His thin frame was almost drowned in an oversized flight suit.