Light Shaper (17 page)

Rigel was panting, struggling again to breathe properly now that the bruise on his chest was acting up again, and his shoulder was throbbing with acid jolts of agony every time he moved a little. He stayed on the cool floor of the station, trying to recover, and eventually his heartbeat stopped pounding in his ears, and his breathing slowed down to a normal level. Rigel gulped, forcing himself not to cry out in pain as he sat up in the darkness, and then listened.

Nothing. Outside, not a sound. Rigel had guessed that he was hiding in an abandoned subway station, but he couldn’t be sure. It really didn’t matter, as long as nobody saw him.

He stayed motionless, grabbing his injured shoulder with one hand and listening like a scared rabbit for the predators to show up at the entrance of his hideout. Nobody came. Eventually the ache in his shoulder became bearable, the bleeding slowed, and his right hand stopped trembling so badly. Rigel stood up cautiously, cracked the door open a tiny bit, and peered outside into the blazing sunlight.

Empty.

Rigel didn’t know why they hadn’t come after him if the guard had clearly seen him take off in this direction, but he really didn’t care. He had to get back home, somehow, go to the police or to the hospital or both, get protection from the madman that ran CradleCorp. He couldn’t venture out into the open, though. Not yet.

He reached into his pocket and closed his fingers around the quantum drive Atlas had given him. He took it out and was surprised to see that it was still glowing, even disconnected from any other power source. In fact, it was bright enough to illuminate a reasonably sized area around Rigel there in the dark. Rigel lifted the object up to examine it, squinting against the orange glare. At first he had thought it was just a regular thumb drive, but now that he looked at it, he realized it was like nothing he had ever seen before. It was shaped like a small cylinder made entirely out of something that felt like glass. The inside was completely transparent, but instead of circuits or cables, all Rigel was able to see was a tiny glowing sphere in the center of the cylinder, hovering there no matter which way he shook the object. The glow came from it, but Rigel could feel no heat radiating out of it. It was very mysterious, and almost certainly a classified object of ancient technology. He wondered how valuable it was, for Atlas to have given it to him. He wondered what CradleCorp would do once they confirmed that he had stolen something from them on top of having broken into the premises.

Rigel was holding the object still when something strange happened. The moment the cylinder made contact with the metal in his left hand brace, it stopped glowing altogether and became stuck fast to the thick metal underside of Rigel’s medical support, almost as if it had suddenly turned into a magnet. Rigel tried to pry it away, but he could not move the cylinder and he did not want to pull too hard with his right hand in case he injured himself even more. He also did not want the gunshot wound to bleed more than it had to. He tried pressing on the little thing, poking it every which way until he gave up. There was no separating it from the metal it had stuck to.

Rigel sighed and closed his eyes for a second. He was scared, he was hurt, and he was in possession of something he did not understand. The worst part was that the only thing he could do was wait. He couldn’t go out now, but staying was also dangerous. He’d have to wait until the coast was clear… and then pray he would be able to get onto the Skytrain and back home in one piece.

Before he bled out. Before he was discovered.

“WHAT DO
you mean, he escaped?” Armando Scholl bellowed when he got to where Barrow was standing.

“The door opened for him,” Barrow answered gruffly, standing at attention. “Then he slammed it shut in my face, and I couldn’t get it open again.”

Scholl got a little redder with anger. When he next spoke, it was in a misleadingly measured voice, soft but still clear enough for the dozen or so security guards gathered around the two of them to hear. “You’re telling me that you, Steve Barrow, a guy three times the size of that kid, simply let him slip through your fingers? And that he magically had the door open for him without you reacting in any way to stop him whatsoever?”

“I shot him,” Barrow said, starting to get angry too. “Shoulder wound. He got away before I could hit him again. But with the door in the way—”

“That door should not have opened. We are in full security lockdown! Unless that Blake kid is some kind of computer genius, I don’t see how it’s possible. Lane!” Scholl yelled, switching the focus of his anger. “You better tell me what’s wrong with that damn door.”

Miranda Lane had been busily examining the electronic lock on the door with some kind of high-tech scanning equipment. She removed her goggles and turned to look at the boss.

“There’s nothing wrong,” she said. “The lock hasn’t been forced or hacked or destroyed. As far as I can tell, this door hasn’t been opened since we first started the security lockdown. I’d have to look at the logs to confirm it, but—”

“But the damn kid got away! Through here! Or at least that’s what Barrow claims….”

“He did,” Barrow growled. “I’m not making stuff up.”

Scholl picked up a small communicator and brought it up to his ear. “Larry! I need confirmation that the target left through the back of sector G. Can you get me a visual or an infrared on the area with a full scan…? What do you mean none of the sensors are working? And the motion detectors? Not even the damn video cameras? Fine! Just fix it! And call me when you have confirmation!”

Scholl stashed the communicator away angrily and looked at the guards he had assembled. “Since not a damn electronic thing seems to be working at the moment, people, we will go out and search for the target ourselves. The old-fashioned way. Lane! Open that door right now. Everyone else, fan out over the desert perimeter. He can’t have gone far. Shoot to kill if you have to, and call for help if you run into trouble. Stay within line of sight of at least one other person. Got it? We don’t know what this guy is capable of. He could be armed.”

“It won’t open,” Miranda Lane said.

Scholl wheeled about to face her. “What?”

“You heard me. The door is not opening. I tried an override, and it’s ignoring it. It’s almost as if something is keeping it locked on purpose.”

Scholl looked about to pop a vessel. “Are you sure.” It wasn’t even a question.

“Yes. If we’re going to get out of here, we’ll need to use some other exit. And bring one of the techies from upstairs to have a go in here. I can’t do anything else.”

Scholl closed his eyes slowly, then opened them again. At that moment, his personal radio crackled to life, and they all heard the angry voice on the other side.

“Scholl!” Richard Tanner said. “You let the target get away!”

“Small setback,” Scholl answered into the radio. “We’re locked in. Whatever that kid did, we can’t follow him through sector G.”

There was a pause on the other side. Then Tanner said, “That exit is not responding. I have issued an executive override for the main doors of the building. Head over there, and find that man.”

“You heard him, people,” Scholl told them. “Get moving! Lane, leave that door. Barrow, you’re with me. Try not to screw up again. Let’s go!”

They hurried out of the sector in an orderly rank, not quite running but moving fast. They passed groups of confused customers, other security deployments, and a few members of staff that had absolutely no idea what was going on. In some areas the alarms were still blaring, and some sectors were completely closed off due to the lockdown.

“Shoulder wound?” Miranda asked Barrow, catching up to him as they hurried along after Scholl. Barrow dropped slightly behind the group to answer her.

“He surprised me,” he said, keeping his gun pointing down as he moved, holding it with both hands like Miranda was doing. “Lucky shot too. Mostly superficial. And these rubber bullets don’t do much damage anyway.”

“Lucky for you, or lucky for him?” she asked, and her gaze was strangely earnest.

Barrow blinked, surprised by the question. When he had seen Aaron Blake coming straight at him, he had reacted instinctively. The shot had been meant to disable, not kill. But then Barrow had let him go. He’d had a clear shot of Blake right before he slammed the door shut, and Barrow hadn’t taken it. Had Lane seen? She had been the first to reach Barrow’s position, after all. Or was she only guessing? “I don’t know,” he answered at last. “I guess both.”

“Good to know you have a conscience,” she told him. Then she ran ahead with the rest of the group.

Barrow hurried to catch up too, but suddenly a new, more urgent alarm began screeching down a perpendicular hallway. It sounded important.

Barrow’s phone buzzed urgently. He took it out of his pocket.

Attend to that alarm.

—Atlas.

He couldn’t ignore an order from his blackmailer.

“I’ll go check that alarm out!” Barrow bellowed.

Scholl turned around at the head of the squad and caught Barrow’s eye. He seemed mistrustful, but the hurry was obviously greater. “Fine! Go see what’s wrong. Then call me up and report!”

“Yes, sir!” Barrow said, and broke away from the group. He headed down the hall, past a frightened group of scientists, and made a hard right into the area where the alarm was coming from. He found himself in a conference room, completely empty aside from the equipment and furniture. A few toppled chairs here and there and a business presentation still being projected onto a wall on the far end testified as to what had been happening inside the room before the security lockdown was established. Barrow scanned the room quickly, looking for the source of the alarm, but he hadn’t taken more than a few steps inside when the blaring sound was cut off abruptly. The windows along the side of the room turned opaque, and the main door shut on its own with a slam.

Barrow tried to get out, but the door wouldn’t budge. He tried the windows, but they were also shut tight, and Barrow knew they were bulletproof glass. He tried calling on his communicator—nothing. His radio was dead too. And the lights inside the room were dimming.

A flicker of motion caught Barrow’s eye, and he swung around to the far end, gun held ready. But he was alone in the room. Nothing was moving, except—

The presentation. The slide with boring figures had been replaced with something far more familiar to Barrow. It was an image that sent a shiver down his spine and caused his eyes to widen in shocked recognition.

It was a blurry still from a shipboard security camera. It depicted a section of the cargo hold of the vessel, a place unforgettable to Barrow. It was the hold of the
Titania
, the ship where he had last worked as a security officer. But that wasn’t what made Barrow back away from the image until his back was against the wall. It was the dead body of a man, sprawled on the floor with one of his legs bent at an unnatural angle. And standing over him, his features perfectly recognizable despite the distortion in the image, was Barrow. He was holding a long metal bar in both hands—a support rod he’d yanked off the hull in the fight, and the weapon he had used to kill the other man.

Barrow had a flash of memory looking at that picture. He remembered hands clamping like an iron vise around his throat, a hard kick, and one of his ribs breaking, then muffled grunts of pain and the sickening crunch of the metal bar connecting with something that gave way, again and again and again. He remembered the dull ringing in his ears, the way every detail in that room had been sharply defined, impossible to forget, as he looked around frightened, his red-stained weapon trembling in the grip of his hand.

Barrow shook his head to chase away the images. He had never been caught for the murder. He had made sure to erase every shred of evidence that linked him to it, and the rest of the crew of the
Titania
had protected him. No record was supposed to have remained!

Until now. This one blurry image was enough for Barrow to get the death penalty should it be forwarded to the right people. But how? How had they gotten this data? And who was behind it? Who was Atlas?

Trying not to panic, Barrow spent the next few minutes trying to break out of his enclosure, but unsuccessfully. He was so busy trying to find a way out that at first he didn’t notice a message had appeared, the letters superimposed on the image that condemned him. When he saw them, Barrow stopped at once. Whoever it was, he was now talking.

Hello, Steve Barrow.

Barrow looked all around him. Only then did he notice the two security cameras on the ceiling, both trained on him. He put his gun away and faced one of them squarely. “Atlas, I assume. Just tell me what the hell you want,” he said between gritted teeth. “You know as well as I do that I have no choice.”

Interesting reaction. You are not curious as to who I am?

“Oh, I will find out. But if you’re smart enough to mess around with me in the safest building in the entire city, then I bet you’re smart enough not to tell me your real name. Just tell me what you want so I can give it to you and that image gets destroyed.”

Like I said before: I require a service.

“What kind of service?”

I need you to find Aaron Blake and bring him safely to a location I will disclose later. You are to protect him with your life.

Alongside the words, Atlas showed Barrow a recent picture of Blake. Barrow didn’t need it, as he remembered only too well their encounter not ten minutes ago. Barrow considered asking Atlas why he wanted him to find Blake, but he held back. He had plenty of experience dealing with people with shady motivations, and he had learned that the less he knew about them, the better. So instead he asked, “How do I find him?”

He is headed toward the city at this moment, to Memorial Hospital for emergency treatment of his gunshot wound. Follow him there, and get him to safety. I will communicate with you again when you are together.