Peter Hamilton - Fallen Fragon

He opened his eyes. The room was a cell, four meters by four, no window, just a conditioning grille. He was lying on a bench opposite a heavy metal door. A small camera on the ceiling was angled down to look at him.

Cells in the spaceport security division were very similar. They might not have moved him yet. In which case he stood a chance. He knew the entire spaceport layout.

That thought made him pause. He hadn't known about the elevator. And there must have been at least one alarm that wasn't on any file they'd accessed when they were planning the break-in. Most likely it was something that Z-B had discreetly installed after they took control of the administration block. Even so, his Prime should have caught it going off.

Making a show of being slow and confused, he sat up, rubbing at his hair. The manacles made the movement difficult, He frowned at them. "What the hell..."

Nobody came in to explain. He padded over to the door. The tile floor was cold under his bare feet. "Hey!" He banged on the door. "Hey, what's going on here?" There were grazes on his knuckles where he'd hit the elevator doors. That could have been a mistake. If they measured the dent he'd made they could work out the force behind the blow. That would make them very interested in him. Not that they wouldn't be anyway. But he couldn't allow them to examine his body too closely. The patternform sequencers must be protected at all costs.

He padded back to the bench and sat down. It was standard procedure to let prisoners sweat for a while after they'd been captured, allow them to build up some anxiety. Not that such crudities would affect him. But he had to decide what to do next. The d-written cells in his cheeks and jaw had held their shape while he was unconscious. He still had Sket Magersan's face. Z-B would have checked with the real pilot. They'd know this was a serious sabotage attempt by a resistance group.

Interrogation by Z-B would inevitably involve medical diagnostics, probably including a full brain scan. The d-writing modifications were subtle, but with that sort of scan there was a high risk of exposure. And he wasn't entirely certain he could hold out against the drugs. His d-written neurons were hardly omnipotent and Z-B had been dealing with resistance movements across decades and dozens of planets. By now, their techniques and technology for extracting information would be formidable.

The choice was simple. The longer he remained captive, the lower his chances would be of escaping. If he was going to get out it would have to be before they fully realized what he was physically capable of.

That brought him back full circle to how they'd caught him in the first place. He started to go over the break-in right from the start.

It was another two hours before the cell door opened. Josep still hadn't worked out what he'd done to set off an alarm. Two guards came in, their navy-blue uniforms sporting a small Z-B insignia on the collar. Both of them wore helmets with tinted visors; they held long truncheons with shock prongs on the end.

A simple white one-piece suit was slung at him.

"Put that on," one of the guards said.

Josep picked it up and let it unroll. He held his arms up, shaking the manacles at them. "You'll need to take these off."

"Nice try. Just put it on."

The suit sleeves had a seam down the sides, fastened with studs. He struggled into the lower part of the garment, and one of the guards fastened the studs for him.

They marched him out into a short, curving corridor. Josep checked the length and height, and knew exactly where he was: administration block, third floor. The security division had a long section all to itself in the five-sided building. Floor blueprints rushed through his mind. The only ways in or out of this section were two elevators and an emergency fire exit. He couldn't use the elevators, they were code-guarded—not forgetting what happened last time he used an elevator in this building. The fire exit was the obvious route, but there were strong safeguards there as well.

"Where are we going?" he asked.

"You'll see soon enough."

They were walking in the direction opposite the elevators. The only rooms ahead were the offices. They must have set up their interrogation equipment in one of them. He still couldn't sense a signal from a datapool node.

They turned a corner. The walls of this corridor were lined with doors. He named them silently as they went past: departmental management, briefing one, two, and three, investigator lieutenant, finance. Josep swayed slightly to shift his balance and kicked at the guard on his left. It was a perfect aim, heel smashing into the man's kneecap. He yelled in pain and went down. The second guard slammed his truncheon into Josep's back, and the shock prongs flared, pumping a charge into him. His d-written cells resisted the blast of electricity—just keeping his nerve channels open. He turned and wrenched the truncheon from the guard's grip. The man grunted in surprise at the force. Then Josep stabbed the truncheon into his stomach. The guard staggered backward, doubling up before finally keeling over.

Josep jabbed the truncheon into the first guard's neck as he was trying to rise. He collapsed back onto the carpet. At the other end of the corridor two men in Z-B uniforms were shouting as they ran toward him. A shrill alarm went off, terribly loud in the confined space. The security AS must have seen the whole thing through the surveillance cameras.

Josep threw the truncheon at the two running men, then charged at the door to the finance office. It wasn't even locked. As he expected, Z-B didn't have any use for financial staff; the office was empty, abandoned for the duration. There were three desks lined up down the middle of the floor, cluttered with old memory chips and piles of hard copy. Desktop pearls were inactive. The wall opposite the door was tinted glass from floor to ceiling, facing out across the spaceport hangars. He rushed over to the last desk and heaved it into the air, then flung it at the glass wall. The toughened glass shattered, sending a blizzard of shards swirling outward. More alarms started up. The desk crashed down on the edge of the hole it had created, half of it still in the office. It wobbled unsteadily. Josep kicked it, sending it sliding out over the edge to smash into the flowerbeds three floors below.

The office door burst open. Z-B staff rushed in. Josep jumped after the desk.

Three stories in Thallspring's standard gravity. The fall was enough to shatter most of a man's lower skeleton when he hit. Damage to the organs from the massive impact deceleration would probably be fatal. Josep thrust his manacled arms above his head, desperate to keep his balance. It was surprisingly quiet as the warm late-afternoon air rushed round him. He bent his legs fractionally as the flowerbeds hurtled up.

His feet crashed into the hard soil, and his knees bent, absorbing as much of the terrible impact as they could. Suddenly his shoulder was smacking into the ground, knocking the breath from him. His bones held, though his ankle and knee joints sent pulses of pure agony into his spine. He blinked away the tears of pain. Rosebushes had torn at his legs. A glass splinter was embedded in his foot. Astonished Z-B personnel were leaning out through the broken glass of the finance office, peering down at him.

Josep ordered his deadened limbs to move, rolling onto all fours, then standing. Shouts from above mingled with the persistent howl of the alarm. He took a few excruciating steps until he bumped into the base of the building's glass wall. After that he could use it for support as he moved along. Somewhere up ahead was a door used by the maintenance staff. On the other side of the glass, people were standing up at their desks, pointing at him as he slid past.