Patrick Lee - The Breach

He took the rifle from where he'd leaned it, but kept the crowbar. Went to the stairwell and descended one floor to B5. Security Control. Pilgrim's nearest people, after this floor, should be five levels down in the conference room, watching Paige and the others. Still too close to risk gunshots. Sound might carry that far through the vents.

Security Control had the same kind of door as Defense Control. Same room layout too. But only one of Pilgrim's men was on duty.

Travis went in and beat him to death. In a way, the past half hour had been worse than the time Paige had spent under torture in Alaska. If not physically, then in every other sense.

All that she had devoted her life to was about to end. Worse: it would be inverted to its malicious opposite. What Tangent had watched over and shepherded with the best interests of the world in mind, Pilgrim would sic on humanity to serve himself. Or if the Whisper's own plan really did take precedence, maybe something worse was coming. Something beyond the limits of what she could dread.

She'd spent these thirty minutes thinking of the most dangerous things locked up in the steel catacombs below her, and the harm they could sow.

Then there was Travis's corpse. Still lying right in front of her. She'd woken up naked in his arms forty-five minutes ago, about as happy as she'd ever been since restricting her life to Border Town. Now he was gone. Because of what she'd asked him to do. It didn't help to remind herself there'd been no other option. Nothing helped.

She looked at the guards. Three of them now. All of them watching, not even glancing away. No chance to make any move. Except to make them kill her.

Which wasn't entirely crazy.

She knew what it felt like to wish for death as an escape. Whatever the hell Pilgrim was keeping her and the others alive for, it was likely to put her back in those straits. Very likely.

Fuck it, then.

The nearest guard was five feet away from her. Offering no warning about her intentions, she pitched her body forward into a somersault-tricky with her hands bound behind her-and came upright again with her right leg drawn against her chest, a foot away from the man. He drew back reflexively, one leg going back, the other staying in place, the knee locking straight. Beautiful.

Paige pistoned her foot into his knee as hard as she could. Heard it crack. Saw the leg bend exactly backward from the way nature had designed it to. He screamed and collapsed, keeping hold of his rifle, and centering it on her face now.

She closed her eyes, and a second later the room exploded with automatic rifle fire.

Whatever dying was supposed to feel like, this wasn't it. She heard bodies falling. Wondered how the hell she was capable of hearing anything. Or even thinking, given that her head should have been shattered by now.

The shooting stopped.

She opened her eyes.

The three guards were dead. And there was a rifle floating in the air.

Travis couldn't tell if there was more happiness or anger in her embrace. Either one might account for the fierceness of it. Over her shoulder, he saw the others passing the wire cutters along one by one, each freed person flexing circulation back into near-dead hands.

On the table beside him lay the backpack, which he'd worn under the suit, and the top half of the suit itself, which he'd taken off a moment earlier.

At last Paige let go of him and met his eyes. She had only a little difficulty finding her voice. "It's against the rules to double human bodies, you know."

"I'm new here," he said. "Gimme a break."

He glanced at his corpse on the floor. Christ, it was a sight.

Behind Paige, the last of the survivors had been freed. Some were looking at Travis, but most were watching the doorway warily.

Travis turned to the backpack, unzipped it, and took out the Doubler. "You guys can make enough weapons to protect yourselves, if anyone else shows up here. But I think all the rest are working on the blast doors on B42."

He picked up the top half of the transparency suit again. "I'll go take care of them now."

He saw Paige's eyes after he said that. Saw that she wanted to go with him, her instinct compelling her to put herself in harm's way before others, or at least share the danger. But the obvious didn't need stating: the suit's advantage only worked if he went alone.

So instead she only nodded. "They'll be on a maintenance rig suspended in the elevator shaft from the floor above. It's the only way to access those doors."

He nodded, kissed her, then pulled on the suit top.

It was strange, watching her eyes lose him. She was still looking at where his face had been.

He turned toward the three guards he'd killed a moment before. Two of them wore holstered pistols in addition to the rifles they'd carried. The advantage of a pistol, small enough to conceal beneath the transparency suit, was obvious. Travis had seen that advantage annihilate a team of heavily armed men in Alaska, and had come within a second or two of falling prey to it himself. It didn't escape him that the tables were now precisely turned. He was the one in the suit this time, going up against the Whisper. If he made the slightest mistake, and allowed Pilgrim time to take it out of its box, the suit would be of no help at all. It hadn't been for its last owner.

But he didn't think it would happen that way. It would be nothing so simple. Not after all this. Not after reading the message on Ellis Cook's painting.

He was resigned now to whatever fate the Whisper had mapped out for him, and for the world. There was simply no avoiding it. There was only hitting it head-on and finding out what the hell it was.

He took the nearest guard's pistol-a.45-and the two spare clips in the man's pocket, and started for the door.

Then he stopped. And though no one could see it, he smiled.

"The elevator is three stories below us," he said. "The cables are broken, so its brakes against the shaft wall must've stopped it."

"Yeah," Paige said, looking toward the sound of his voice.

"Anyone know how to override them?"

Pilgrim stood at the wedged-open shaft doors and stared down into the semi-darkness. Ten feet below, his fat-ass second in command, Jackley, with the help of three others, was making good progress on the blast doors. It was tedious work. The hanging platform-its suspension cables came up through the open doors to anchor blocks bolted into the corridor floor-made a terrible base from which to drill. The harder Jackley pushed the carbide bit against the steel, the more the platform itself moved. To cope with this long-foreseen problem, the others on the platform had two-by-fours that they propped against the shaft wall, opposite the drilling focus. The nearer end of each two-by-four had a flat board tacked onto it, and Jackley braced his back against these as he drilled. It was a tricky solution that required a lot of hands and attention, but it did the job.

Pilgrim wasn't stressed about it. In truth, he couldn't remember the last time he'd felt stress of any kind. How could he, with the Whisper in his service, leading him all these years to the goal he'd demanded of it?

Control of Border Town.

Control of all the powerful things that lay inside the Primary Lab, just beyond the blast doors below. So many of the wonders in there, Tangent had never fully understood. Entities that were obviously built for great and terrible purposes, but which the researchers had never learned how to operate. How to even switch on, in some cases.

The Whisper would know, though. Once he was in there, he'd have everything he needed.

Over the years, he'd learned not to question the snaking course it had charted for him. It was a great big thing that he'd asked of it. A thing he'd have never accomplished on his own. So of course the plan would be puzzling to him. Of course it would be elaborate and confusing. That was part of its power. And now it'd worked. He was here because he'd trusted the Whisper and followed its plotted track exactly.