Free Radical (31 page)

Suddenly it dawned on him the something had been blocking the door, and he had no idea what it was. Whatever it was, it would still be in the elevator when it got here.

He drew his pistol and stepped back from the door.

Sweat rolled down his face and into his eyes. His arms still burned from exertion, and he could see the muzzle of his pistol trembling slightly.

There was a soft chime, and the doors slid open. He tensed.

The elevator was dark. The inner light was out. He hesitated.

The inner doors began to slide shut. They closed on the handle of a screwdriver and bounced open again.

Deck moved forward and carefully examined the interior. There was a dark stain on the wall, which was almost certainly dried blood. The floor had another streak of dried blood that ran from the floor in front of the elevator controls and out the door.

Inside, the control panel had been ripped open and circuit boards hung freely from the gaping hole. A toolbox sat below the mess of wires. Someone had been killed while trying to hack the controls, and had then been dragged away.

The mess of wires explained why the elevator seemed to be such a mess when he accessed it using his implant. He held his hand up to the dataport but nothing happened. The dataport would have been used by bots who didn't have fingers for pushing buttons, and had naturally been disconnected by the would-be hacker who had been messing with the controls.

The buttons didn't work either. He would have to fix the controls before he could go anywhere.

Sighing, he grabbed the screwdriver and began poking at the nest of tangled wires and electronic guts that hung from the elevator wall.

Suddenly the doors began to slide closed. He dove for it, shoving his hand through the gap just before it sealed. The metal hammered closed on his fingers and then rolled open again. He jerked his stinging hand away and spat out an angry curse.

If he had allowed the doors to close, he would have been sealed inside of the darkened elevator. The controls were useless, so he wouldn't have been able open it again. In the darkness, he would have no way of fixing it. He could have been sealed in until he died of thirst. He shook his head, realizing he had almost killed himself with a simple absent-minded error.

He pushed the toolbox into the open door and returned his attention to the controls.

Several minutes of experimentation yielded little in the way of progress. He had managed to get the elevator music to turn on, and then off again. The emergency alarm had gone off and he spent several minutes trying to deactivate it again. While he was doing that, he found the controls for the interior lights, and the display for the current floor.

He marveled that he hadn't been overrun by mutants, bots, or cyborgs by now. Between his yelling and the elevator alarm, it was a miracle that he hadn't drawn any attention.

Finally he managed to get the dataport running again. That was all he needed. He could control everything else from there.

A door opened in the reception area, outside of his field of view. He didn't wait to see who it was. He kicked the toolbox out of the elevator, jacked in, and ordered it to the reactor level.

A shadow moved into view as the doors slid shut. A moment later, there was a deafening impact and the elevator shook violently. A fist-sized hole had appeared in the thick steel door.

The elevator began to move downward.

There was another impact, and another hole appeared in the wall just above his head. He dropped to the ground. As the elevator continued downward, he could hear the attack continue above, perforating the armored walls of the shaft with gaping holes.

He looked at the hole that had appeared just above his head. If the elevator hadn't already been descending, it would probably have hit him. What the hell kind of weapon could do that, and who would be insane enough to use one on a space station?

The reactor level stood in extreme contrast to the executive level. The walls and floor were naked metal. The lights were set deep into fixtures, casting harsh, overlapping pools of light. The air was cold.

As the doors opened they revealed a dark smear of dried blood on the floor that lined up with the darkened streaks inside the elevator. Whoever had been killed while hacking the elevator was on this level when it happened.

A lot of the lights were out, and others seemed to be suffering from a constant brownout.

The echo of ventilation fans surrounded him, dampening all other sounds. If someone was just five meters away, they would probably have to shout to be understood.

He checked the digital map. From here he needed to find a way to descend through the communications tower. There was no elevator leading there, so that meant he would have to climb down.

Slowly he proceeded north. Access panels had been pulled from the walls everywhere, and thick plastic tubes spilled out onto the floor. Some tubes contained power or networking cables, others carried various gases and liquids. Random floor tiles - a meter square each - had been removed to reveal more of the same. Every ten meters or so there was a ventilation duct coughing out cold, stale air.

He rounded a corner to find a hopper bot working. It was essentially an arm on wheels. Its single appendage ended in an array of tools. Right now it seemed to be welding some exposed equipment in the ceiling.

Deck moved carefully. He didn't know how large its field of vision would be, but assumed it would be fairly small. It was just used for maintenance, and didn't need to be keenly aware of its surroundings. All it needed to see was whatever it was working on.

He crept past, leaving the bot to its work, and descended a clanky metal staircase onto a narrow catwalk. The catwalk overlooked a pair of large CO2 tanks.

He followed the catwalk around the perimeter of the room where it ended in a ladder going down. With heavy sigh, he began his descent.

The tower was a vertical series of four tall chambers connected by narrow shafts. Each chamber was narrower than the one above. Catwalks, ladders, and stairs were the only means of vertical travel. He would need to climb all the way to the bottom. In the last chamber were the the connections that led to the primary data feed.

A long spinal cord of thick tubing ran through the center of the tower. At the top of the tower it was a thick mass that was just over two meters in diameter. At the base of each chamber several of the tubes broke from the main cluster and ran along the floor, leading through the outer hull and connecting to various hardware on the exterior of the tower.

He reached the base of the first chamber and walked around the mass of tubing in the center. A wide circular hole in the floor led down the first shaft. It was a ten meter drop straight down. A ladder ran down the side of the shaft. The entire trip down promised to be this way; catwalk, ladder, catwalk, ladder, etc.

While he was sick of climbing down ladders, he found this to be much easier than the climbing he'd done earlier. The rungs were wide and thick, and covered in a hard foam rubber. The process seemed to get easier the further down he progressed.

He winced at the the thought of climbing back up. That was going to suck.

He reached the base of the shaft and dropped down into the next chamber. There was a mild downdraft flowing through the tower, and the air seemed cool.

He found himself at the top of another set of catwalks.

The climb became easier as he progressed, and he eventually realized he was getting lighter. Apparently, the tower didn't have gravity plates of its own, and relied on the gravity plates of the decks above. As he put more distance between himself and the reactor level, the force of gravity lessened.

Gravity plates were another breakthrough from the research labs at TriOptimum. They used quantum sorting techniques to distribute gravitons on either side of the plate; positive gravitons would go on one side and negative gravitons on the other. The effect was that it would pull on things above it and push on those below.

Gravity plates were a major factor in the success of Citadel. Because of the negative effects of weightlessness on the body, long term work without gravity was out of the question. Creating artificial gravity through rotation was complex and ungainly. Gravity plates made long-term work in space simpler and cheaper. TriOp was the only company who had it, and they weren't sharing.

By the time he reached the final chamber, Deck weighed about half of what he normally did.

At the base of the last shaft was a sliding gate. It was a circle of chain-link fence encased in a sturdy metal frame. It was locked. A metal sign affixed to the fence declared , "Restricted Area".

The gate restricted access to the sensitive parts of the tower, while still allowing airflow. The downdraft was much stronger here.

There was a keypad set into the wall of the shaft, just beside the gate. He jacked in. He hacked it. The gate rolled open.

The final chamber was a cone shaped space that was twenty meters in diameter at the top, and slowly tapered off to a point at the base. The spinal cord of power and network cables had been reduced from dozens of tubes to just five, all of which ran into the tip of the cone where they would connect to the communications array. The space was filled with narrow metal supports that crisscrossed the room, providing excellent handholds in the low-gravity environment.

As he had descended, he could feel the temperature drop. Here at the bottom of the tower it was cold enough that he could see his breath.

The space was illuminated by several portable fluorescent lights that had been clamped to the outer walls. The light shone between the metal supports, forming a lattice of shadows on the walls.

There were four vertical beams running down the walls. These would be the main support beams. He needed to blow these up if he wanted to completely separate the communications array from the station.

He leapt from one metal bar to another until he reached the first of the large metal beams along the outer wall. He found leaping and balancing to be child's play at one-half gravity.

He withdrew the first explosive gel pack and detonator. He tore the covers from the two sharp hypodermic style needles on the detonator and inserted them into the gel. He hit the "ARM" button and the detonator injected an opaque white material into the clear gel. Despite the thickness of the gel, the two seemed to mix evenly. Twenty seconds after injection, it looked like a pouch of milk. He could feel it become warm as the chemicals mixed.

Deck tore the cover from the pouch's adhesive strip and gently pushed it onto the metal beam. He needed to be careful at this point, since it was now very volatile.

He repeated the entire process for the next two pillars. For the last one, he would need to set the timer. The explosion of the first one would set off the others. He just needed to decide how much time he wanted.

Not counting the time he'd spent resting, the climb down seemed to have taken about three minutes. He gave himself ten to get back up. That should leave plenty of room for error.

He set the final charge and set the timer for ten minutes. His finger hovered over the Enable button. He took one last look around the room.

A camera quietly observed him from the outer edge of the room. He looked back. Something felt wrong to him. Something was making him uneasy. It reminded him of the night he escaped from the TriOp building. He had the feeling he was missing something.

The camera had no answers to offer him.

He shook his head and thumbed the Enable button. The timer began counting down.

10:00

He scrambled up the ladder. Technically, he had plenty of time, but he wasn't taking any chances. When this stuff went off he wanted to be on a whole different level of the station. This demolition was far from precise, and there was no telling where hull breaches would occur once the tower was subjected to the force of an explosion.

Halfway up the first shaft, he heard the whine of hydraulic compressors above. At the top of the shaft, a hatch was closing. His eyes widened. He had seen the groove around the edge of the shaft and the keypads on either side, and had never made the connection. The shafts were actually airlocks, capped on either end with heavy doors, which had simply been open on the way down.

The door locked shut above him, and a rotating red emergency light came on.

09:45

He hit the emergency open button, but the door refused. He jacked in, and ran into a wall of black ICE.

Shodan.

There was a metal clang from below.

He cursed. He would have to deactivate the explosives until he could open the door again. If Shodan kept it locked, he would just rip the data feeds out and wait. A bot would show up eventually to fix what he'd done, and to do so it would have to open the door. He started down the ladder.

Glancing down, he saw that the metal gate had rolled shut as well. He was now trapped in the shaft, unable to escape or deactivate the explosives.

Crap!

Once he had descend far enough, he jumped down onto the fence. The low gravity made long vertical drops quite easy. He landed on the fence with a clang. He grabbed the keypad, jacked in, and hit another wall of Shodan's ICE.

He swore, slamming his fist into the metal sign.

8:55

He looked at the latch on the gate. It was some sort of catching mechanism encased in metal. It didn't look very sturdy.

He pulled out his pistol and fired several shots through the metal casing. He couldn't see what the inside of it looked like, but he knew the catch was in there somewhere, and if he destroyed it the door should open.

Several shots passed easily through the metal casing and punctured the hull beyond. There was a loud squeal, like someone letting air out of a balloon and then pinching off the flow. As the sound subsided, a bubble of expansion foam appeared and quickly hardened.

He tried the gate. Still locked.

He changed position, trying to shoot the lock from a different angle. More holes appeared in the latch and in the outer hull.