Offworld (38 page)

They were silent for a moment, thinking, but could still hear the
soldiers moving about. Trisha thought she heard a door open and
close in the distance. Griffin's door-to-door sweep had begun, from
the sound of it.

"No way down .. " said Mae softly to herself.

She was staring at the windows, and Trisha followed her gaze.

"Up," Trisha whispered. The roof. Come on."

Her rifle was slung over one shoulder, but she pulled the strap
around so that the gun came into her hands. She felt stronger just
holding it.

She cracked open the door and peeked out. Another door was
slightly open just across the hall. With a glance down the corridor in both directions, she darted across the hall, Terry and Mae right
behind.

The small office they were in had another door to their right,
which Trisha guessed probably led to a connecting office or utility
room. She pointed to it, and Terry led the way while she quietly
closed the door behind.

`Anybody else hear that?" called out a voice.

The office door had latched when Trisha closed it.

"They're here! Move in!" shouted another voice. It was Griffin
this time.

Heavy footsteps closed in from several directions, and Trisha
followed the others through the next door. She found Terry already
standing on a desk chair and fiddling with the air-conditioning grate
in the ceiling.

Yeah, the ducts ... Let's hope they haven't rusted so much they
won't hold our weight... .

Trisha caught a glimpse of Terry giving Mae a leg up into the duct
when the world blinked and she was somewhere else. She couldn't
move much, then quickly realized her entire body was sinking inside
something with a thick and syrupy consistency, yet it was coarse to
the touch, like quicksand.

There was no air to breathe in this place, and no light to see.
Slowly, very slowly, she sank deeper and deeper, trying to claw her
way up and out but only descending further.

When she could hold her breath no longer, she tried to breathe
through her nose, and got two nostrils full of sand-or something
similar to sand. She needed to cough, to clear whatever was suffocating her, but had no reservoir of air to draw from-

Everything blinked again and she was standing in the tiny office,
still flailing her arms and legs, trying to escape the quicksand. She
couldn't hold in her coughing and gagging, and Terry and Mae-who
were both sprawled on the floor-did likewise.

Griffin and his men out in the hall didn't hear them, because
they were coughing and gagging as well.

"Hurry!" Trisha whispered between hacks. "Go!"

In the hall she heard one of Griffin's men swear loudly. When
he'd collected himself, he shouted, "Sir! Over here!"

Terry's hand extended down from the duct, and Trisha jumped
up and grabbed it. The office door was kicked in from outside with
lots of angry shouting. Trisha snapped the trigger of her rifle, firing
blind and mad in the general direction of the door as Terry pulled
her up.

Main Street stood cluttered with black jeeps and dozens of
soldiers.

Still Owen crept his way down its far side, hiding and clinging
to an endless row of hedges and trees for cover.

Owen kept himself low and agile; he'd even left his rifle behind,
as he stopped two blocks short of the big white office building where
Trisha and the others had called from. Directly across the road from
his position waited a line of three jeeps parked right in the middle
of the street. But the soldiers were everywhere. He could see them
grouped in clusters, moving in every direction, or pacing back and
forth at their posts.

Just two blocks down to his right, a company of more than ten
marched together, two by two, heading south and away from him.
They were outfitted in the usual gray camouflage, weaponry, and
goggles. He was fortunate that none of them looked in his direction as they passed by, or the infrared vision in their goggles would
have easily spotted him hiding in the bushes. But they were still
within earshot, so he remained still and quiet. Another, smaller group
walked down a cross street headed west, and he didn't dare move
until they had passed. A lone soldier paced in front of a bank about
a block to the south. A group of three soldiers caught his attention, approaching from the west, talking as they marched in formation
yet hefting their powerful rifles in two hands and ready to shoot.
Owen was too far away to make out what they were saying, but it
looked like they were on their way back to the jeeps.

As the trio walked behind a big tree, Owen sprinted across the
road and ducked behind the jeep nearest to the three soldiers, praying he was lucky enough that the lone soldier in front of the bank
had been facing the other direction as he ran. When the soldiers
passed by the first jeep, Owen snatched the man pulling up the rear
of their formation, yanking him to the right without a sound. The
other two men were at their respective vehicles before realizing their
compatriot was not at his.

They turned and doubled back, regrouping to find him unconscious on the ground between two jeeps. As they knelt to inspect
his prone form, Owen rendered one unconscious with a powerful
blow to the back of the head while nearly simultaneously slipping
behind the third solder and slapping a hand over his mouth, preventing him from calling out.

The soldier managed to snatch a long and deadly looking knife
and arced it up, trying to jab Owen in the ear with it, but Owen
caught the man's hand and held it at bay, the tip barely an inch from
touching his head.

Owen twisted the wrist holding the knife and brought it up
into the small of the soldier's back. Once it was in place, he gave it
a brutal tug, snapping the soldier's elbow. The man tried to scream
into Owen's hand, but only a muffled howl emerged, too low for
anyone but Owen to hear.

Owen turned loose of the man and spun him around in the
same motion, chancing a quick extension to his full height. The
man's mouth was now free to yell, but in that split second he was
too preoccupied with the forearm that hung limp at his side. Owen
grabbed the man around the neck and pulled down while bringing
one knee up to collide with the man's nose.

The man had barely hit the ground when Owen heard a voice
from just inches over his right shoulder.

"Don't move," said the newcomer.

Owen spun, grabbing the soldier's gun by the barrel with one
hand and pointing it up at the sky, while using his other hand to
grab the man's ear. He continued the motion, slamming the soldier's
head down onto the hood of the nearest jeep. The soldier joined the
pile of unconscious men on the ground, making four of them in one
tidy little spot, while Owen crouched beside them and took a proper
hold of the rifle he'd removed from the newcomer's hands.

They're going to know what were doing, and they're going to be
coming. Any minute ... !

Trisha wedged her rifle into the handle of the one door that led
from the building below to the roof. Finished, she looked around,
surveying the landscape.

Getting up here had been the easy part. Getting down would
be impossible.

There were no ladders, no escape chutes, no convenient fire
escapes. There was nothing. Just a straight drop over the side to the
street, more than ten stories down.

"Get down!" Terry screamed at the same moment gunshots were
fired at them. The sniper across the street, whom they'd eluded
earlier, had climbed to a higher vantage point and was now firing
on them.

Trisha and Mae scrambled behind the rooftop access doorway,
while Terry ducked below the edging of the roof, chancing a wild
shot now and then but having no luck hitting the sniper.

Trisha clutched at her abdomen, her stomach cramping. She
forced herself to ignore the sensation. There was no time to think
about it now.

Someone banged on the door from the inside and shouted at them to open it immediately. It sounded like Major Griffin again.
She'd known of him less than fifteen minutes and she was already
sick of his voice.

"Where's my air support?!" barked Griffin from just inside the
door. "Corporal, I want this door wired to blow right now!"

"We are so exceedingly dead," Terry said under his breath.

"Need to go," whispered Mae.

Trisha had almost forgotten that Mae was with them, she'd said
so little since the soldiers showed up. But even now, in the midst of
all this, she was calm and levelheaded. Trisha was stunned to find
herself thinking that under different circumstances, this girl could've
made a good astronaut.

"Right," Trisha agreed. "There, move!"

She pointed at a large air-conditioning unit attached to the roof,
twenty feet away on the north corner of the building. The three of
them ran; Terry shot in the general direction of the sniper to cover
their steps, but it didn't stop the sniper from firing at them. The
white cement roof popped and crackled, bits of powder rising from
the impact points.

All three of them crashed against the far side of the air-conditioning
unit, crouching there for cover.

"Trisha, do you read?" said Chris' voice in her ear. She took heart
at the sound, a tiny sprout of hope taking root.

"Yeah, we hear you," she replied, panting.

"We have a pair of jeeps standing by. Where are you?"

"Rooftop, same building, ten stories up. Chris, we're taking fireanother rooftop, clue east! We sealed off access from the stairway,
but they're going to break through any minute!"

She heard him exhale a terse breath. `All right, all right, don't
panic. Uhh ... I can see your building. There's another building to
your immediate south; can you get over to that roof?"

Terry spun to look. "Negative, negative!" he said. "The gap's at
least twenty feet!"

All right, listen," Chris said, slowing down. "Beech is working
on a solution, but we need a few minutes to get into position. This
idea he has-it's pretty wild, it's a last resort, but ... listen, we can
do this, you'll just need to-"

"Chris, give me a hand," said Owen in the background. Apparently he'd removed his earpiece.

"Okay, stand by, Trish...."

"Copy that," Trisha replied with false bravery.

The pounding on the rooftop door stopped, which they knew
could only mean one thing: it was being rigged to blow. The sniper
fire had stopped, but only because they were behind cover. She
knew the sniper had to be waiting for them to make a move, his
finger poised on the trigger.

Terry removed his earpiece, and leaned in closer. "Are you
okay?"

Trisha glanced at Mae, who also looked on her with something
like concern in those eerie eyes of hers. "Yeah," she said.

"Really?"

The way he was looking at her, he knew she wasn't okay. But
she lied anyway, long years of silence keeping her from coming
clean. "Yes, I'll he fine."

She wished Chris and Owen would hurry up.

He wouldn't stop staring at her, and neither would Mae. "Really.
I'm okay."

"No, you're not!" he persisted, but Trisha struggled to pay attention to his words while thinking that the roof access door would be
blown out any minute now, that Griffin's air support could be flying
over them already, that Chris would be calling to tell them to move
any second ...

"I can see it in the circles under your eyes," said Terry. "I see
the way you carry yourself, the little winces of pain you try to hide.
I can't imagine . . .

His voice trailed off as he must have noticed that her eyes were burning, her vision blurred. She was about to say something, thank
him or ... something. But Chris' voice in her earpiece cut her off.

"Okay, we're ready here."

Trisha pointed at Terry's hand to let him know to put his earpiece back in.

"Listen carefully," said Chris. "These jeeps come equipped with
winch cables. Beech found a-well, it's some kind of spear gun or
rocket launcher or something in between, I don't know what. Some
of Roston's men were carrying it. He's rigged a cable to it, and when
I drive the jeep up to your building, he's going to shoot the cable
up in your direction. It'll latch onto the building, and you'll have to
slide down it to the ground."