Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) (38 page)

“Go,” Howard said, sweeping the tunnel with his weapon while Carl crept up beside the Marines.

“They weren’t killed with weapons fire,” Carl told him after a quick examination of the bodies. “These two were killed by a harvester. Stinger wounds.”

“Our friendly neighborhood hitchhiker must have pulled a fast one,” Howard murmured.

“Maybe. And maybe not.” Standing up, he continued down the tunnel. Up ahead he could see the opening to an alcove on the left. “Now we just have to find Jack and Vijay.”

“You won’t find Vijay down here.”

Both men stopped at the hoarse voice that came from the dark recess of the alcove. The momentary silence that followed was broken by a plaintive meow as Jack staggered out, his shotgun cradled in one arm, Koshka in the other.

“The bastard killed those two Marines, then ran,” Jack told them.

“Christ, Jack!” Carl was doubly relieved that his friend was alive and that Koshka was with him. “Are you all right?”

“I took some shrapnel in my legs. It hurts like hell, but none of the fragments are very deep. What’s going on topside?”

Carl grimaced. “Turning on the lights in the building foyer was like hanging out a
Come and Eat
sign. Your buddy from Norway is up there dishing out some humble pie to our bug-eyed friends. I hope.”

Jack cocked his head, listening, as the three turned back toward the lab building basement. “Sounds like it.” Then he stopped. “Wait. You guys didn’t nail the hitchhiker, did you?”

Carl shook his head. “We didn’t see anything or anyone until we found Lowmack’s body. We just figured he went out that way.” He pointed down the length of tunnel past the alcove where Jack had been hiding.

“No, Vijay went that way, but not the hitchhiker.” Jack broke into a fast limp toward the lab building. “Shit! He was somewhere over here when we got ambushed. I holed up in the alcove back there after my night vision goggles died. But he must have doubled back this way, because he didn’t come past me.”

“We went left at the T-junction leading out of the lab,” Howard mused. “He must have gone to the right before we got there and hid around the next corner.”

“And only Renee and Melissa are in the basement,” Carl said through gritted teeth.

The three men ran faster.

***

Renee glanced at the ceiling at the sound of the firing outside.
 

“It’s okay,” she heard Melissa say. The girl was sitting in the chair next to her, with Alexander in her lap. “Terje won’t let them through.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve got a crush on him?”

Melissa’s mouth dropped open. “I do not!”

Renee began to laugh, then cringed as a rippling series of muffled booms echoed through the rooms, followed by what sounded like raindrops the size of bowling balls hammering against a tin roof. “Thor, God of Thunder,” she murmured as the firing outside rose to a fever pitch. She looked back at Melissa. “Thor. Did you know that was the name of my first networked computer?”

“How long ago was that? Did it have a color monitor, or one of those icky green ones?”

Renee scowled at her. “Don’t go there, smartypants.” She leaned forward on the desk, resting her chin on her folded hands. “All I want to do is sleep, but I’ve had so much coffee I’ll be peeing for a week.” She looked at the computer screen, trying to somehow divine what Naomi was doing upstairs from the information fed through the network to and from the various computers and lab equipment upstairs. But all she could really understand was that there was a hell of a lot going on. “God, I wish I was a tenth as smart as she is.”

“Naomi?”

“Yeah.” Renee grinned. “Talk about an overachiever.”

“I wish I was as pretty as she was.”

“You’re beautiful, hon,” Renee told her. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you different. That stuff on your skin doesn’t define you.”

Melissa looked doubtful. “It did before. Everyone thought I was a mutated freak. And I’m only here now and not dead in Chicago because of it. Jack wouldn’t have come for me, otherwise, would he?”

“I guess not. But in that case, give thanks for it. Believe it or not, sometimes crappy stuff that happens to us in life is for a good reason. We just don’t know it at the time.”

Before Melissa could say anything, Alexander tensed. With a deep growl in his throat, he stood up and jumped the short distance from Melissa’s lap to Renee’s desk, taking up a position right in front of the two monitors and blocking Renee’s view.

Rather than scolding him or trying to push him out of the way, Renee reached down and picked up her shotgun. “Get your gun, kid,” she said, “and go over there and duck down behind that cabinet.”

“But…”

“Do it!”

As Melissa did as she was told, Renee knelt down behind the almost nonexistent cover of the open-bottomed workstation, her eyes following Alexander’s rapt gaze toward the access door to the service tunnels. She pointed the shotgun in the same direction, propping the weapon’s bulky magazine on the desktop.
 

Alexander’s growl deepened, and he crouched down low.
 

“I’m scared,” Melissa whispered.

“Just keep your head, and don’t shoot unless I’m down. I don’t want to get shot in the ass again.”

“Okay.”

Gripping the shotgun tighter, Renee focused her attention on the tunnel, trying to ignore the sound of Melissa’s teeth chattering.

“Ma’am, are you okay?”

Renee spun around at the voice. Two Marines drew up short, staring down the barrel of her shotgun.

“Jesus!” She lowered the weapon. “I just about killed you, you idiots! What are you…”

“
Renee!
”

Renee spun back around to see a Marine tumble through the door from the tunnel.
 

He looked at her with wild eyes. “
It’s right behind me!
”

The two Marines raised their weapons, taking aim at the tunnel door as their comrade staggered clear, limping badly.

Turning back around, Renee looked at the tunnel, then at Alexander. The big cat opened his mouth and hissed.

At the limping Marine.

Oh, no
. That was all she had time to think before the Marine impostor whipped up his assault rifle, inhumanly fast, and opened fire.

Tracer rounds whizzed over her head and she ducked down, grabbing Alexander by one of his rear legs to pull him out of the line of fire.

Caught by surprise, the two Marines were knocked backward by the bullets that struck armor and flesh. One of them reflexively squeezed the trigger of his weapon and held it as he went down, shooting half a magazine into the racks of precious computer equipment around them.

Then the harvester turned his weapon on Renee’s workstation. The computer monitor and phone were blasted into pieces. One of the tracer rounds grazed her hair, and she could smell the acrid stench of a few strands burning as she dove to the floor.

Something roared and the room was bathed in a searing white light. Then again. And again.
 

The harvester screeched and stopped firing.
 

Getting up on her knees, Renee peered out from under the workstation, through the legs, to see the harvester slumping to the floor, the malleable flesh of its face and chest burning furiously. Turning around, she saw Melissa standing behind the cabinet where Renee had told her to hide. She was holding her AA-12 shotgun, which still had smoke drifting up from the muzzle.
 

“Jesus Christ, kid,” Renee croaked. “You can have as much dessert as you want tonight.”

“Hold your fire!”

The two turned back to the tunnel, where a familiar bald head was peeking out. “It’s okay, hon,” Renee said to Melissa. “Put that thing down. Carl gets very upset when people shoot at him.”

Nodding, Melissa did as Renee asked. Then the girl doubled over and vomited on the floor.

“My God,” Howard said as he and Carl entered the room. “Are you all right?”

“A little shaken up, but past that, yeah, we’re fine,” Renee answered.

Tossing all decorum aside, Carl pulled her into a tight embrace and held her. He didn’t say anything, just held her.

At their feet, Alexander meowed and strutted over to the third person to enter the room.

“Jack!” Melissa shouted. Then she saw the white fluffy shape Jack held to his chest. “Koshka!” Running to Jack, she threw his arms around him while burying her face in Koshka’s fur.
 

“Annie Oakley here blasted your hitchhiker to pieces,” Renee said, finally pulling away from Carl, who looked at Melissa, then at the burning body of the harvester. “We’re going to send her out to do your dirty work next time, boys.”

“I’m not going to complain,” Howard said as he took a fire extinguisher off the wall and put out the flames. “But look at this place. What a mess.”

The power lights on most of the server towers were dark. Half of the server boxes had holes in them as big as Renee’s index finger, or had their cases blasted to bits. A few threw sparks and smoke into the air.

She caught Melissa’s look of horror and guilt. “It wasn’t you, hon,” she told the girl. “The damage isn’t from your shotgun. Most of it was fire from the harvester’s gun, and the rest from one of the Marines who went down. You did good, understand?”

“Here,” Jack said, “why don’t you look after her.”

Nodding vigorously, Melissa took Koshka from Jack and held her close before kneeling down to show her to Alexander, who sniffed at his companion.
 

Looking around at the devastated electronics, Jack leaned against one of the server racks and asked, “Any chance this can be fixed?”

Renee and Howard exchanged a look before the billionaire said, “It would take us days to fix this, even assuming we could get spares for everything.”

“Then I guess we’d better pray that Naomi got what she needed from the network,” Carl said grimly, tossing aside the blackened remains of a hard drive he’d picked up from the floor, “because we don’t have days. We’ll be lucky if we have hours before we’re overwhelmed here or the harvesters find Ferris at the airport.”

Jack winced and blew out a breath. “Great. Just great.”

BETRAYAL

Naomi looked up from monitoring one of the dozens of items of lab equipment as the door opened and Carl stepped into the room. Two Marines came in with him, weapons at the ready.

“Naomi, a word please,” Carl said.
 

She could tell he was tense, and his eyes flitted over the harvesters. They were, for the moment, easy to spot: Naomi had given them all blue lab coats. The humans wore white.

“Did you find Jack?” She got up and hurried over, and Carl ushered her out the door onto the landing that overlooked the now-darkened foyer. It was a disorienting experience, looking out from this high up into the darkness below. “Is he all right? And when is the network coming back up?”

“Come with me.” He took her by the arm and led her to the stair well. The two Marines he’d brought with him stayed inside the lab.
 

“Carl, what is it?” His behavior was more than odd. He was spooking her.

He remained silent until they reached the lunch room on the ground floor. Opening the door, he quickly ushered her in before closing it behind them to minimize the light spillage.
 

“Jack!” Naomi exclaimed.

“Hey.” He gave her a quick hug, then hissed as the Marine corpsman put some antiseptic on one of the shrapnel wounds in his legs before dressing it with gauze.
 

As a doctor herself, Naomi surveyed the man’s work with a critical eye, nodding to herself in approval. Then, to Jack, she said, “God, what happened to you?”

“I had an argument with a grenade and lost, as usual.”
 

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Carl said, interrupting. “I’m going to give you the good news first. Melissa?”

Naomi turned around to find Melissa coming over with a furry friend in her arms. “Koshka!” Naomi picked the cat up gently and held her.
 

Koshka meowed at the indignity of it all.

“Now I’ve got some bad news,” Carl went on grimly. “Vijay turned on us and escaped.”

“
What?
”

“We were ambushed by the hitchhiker,” Jack told her, “and just as the bastard took down Lowmack, Vijay attacked the other two Marines. I’m not sure, but I think the only reason he didn’t kill me is that he might have been more afraid of the other harvester. He turned and ran.”

“My God. Where did he go?”

“We don’t know,” Carl said. “And that’s what bothers me the most. He knows everything, Naomi. Where we are, what we’re doing, our strengths and weaknesses. If he hooks up with another group like the one that wiped out SEAL-2 and brings them here, we’re finished. The other bad news,” he went on, “you already know about. The computer network is screwed. Half the servers were blasted to bits in the firefight with the hitchhiker. Renee and Howard say it would be days before they could get it back up again, and we don’t have that kind of time.” He stared at her with a questioning look in his eyes. “The question is, where does that leave us?”

“We don’t really need it now,” she said. “It would make certain things easier, but we’re past the analytic and development stage. We had already programmed the equipment before the network died, and the machines can run in local mode.”

Carl leaned forward slightly. “So you did it? You created the weapon?”

“We’ve prototyped it and are replicating it now.”

“You don’t sound too happy about it,” Jack said. “I thought you’d be jumping for joy.”

“We won’t know for sure that it will work until we can test it.”

Carl cocked his head. “And when will that be?”

“The first cultures should be done soon, assuming nothing goes wrong upstairs.”

Jack frowned. “And how are you planning to test it?”

“On the harvesters in the lab.”

“What if you need them again?” Everyone turned as Terje stepped into the room, quickly pulling the door closed behind him. Like the rest of them, he looked as if he’d aged a decade in the last twenty-four hours, and a hundred years in the last week. He collapsed into a chair and set his helmet on the table. He gave Melissa a wan smile as she handed him a cold drink from one of the vending machines.