Insidious Read online

  A black grenade rattled gently across the floor. It acquired them and made a crisp ninety degree turn to roll closer. Aldriena turned to run. The sounds stopped behind her. She knew that meant it had anchored itself somewhere and started to split open like a predatory flower to scan for victims. She focused on the other exit. A thought flitted through her brain as she accelerated toward it.

  Have they already surrounded us? Only one way to find out.

  As she yanked the door open, shots sounded from behind her. Was Martin sticking around to fight? She took a quick look back and saw him lying across a glue floret the size of his torso, his gun leveled at the door.

  Aldriena felt a stab of guilt. He’d blocked the glue grenade to help her escape.

  Damn.

  She bolted out of the room into the cold outer maintenance tube beyond. No rangers awaited her there, so she took a giant leap forward, taking advantage of her low weight. Somehow, she landed without falling and turned a corner, glad to get out of the line of fire.

  Merda.

  It was pressurized outside the pod, but icy cold. The chill began its own assault on her.

  Surely, they could spare some of the hydrogen to warm the barge. But of course, no one’s supposed to be on it.

  The rangers had the drop on her. They would be well equipped and organized. What advantage did she possibly have? She’d gone into Xanadu with a plan and the initiative, but now she was the one unprepared, reacting to their plan.

  At least she had her sticky pads on the hands and feet of her Veer skinsuit. It helped make up for her reduced weight in the barge. The skinsuit was made of military grade combat armor, which didn’t hurt, either. It worked for Aldriena in many ways. Although the garment was thick, it fitted her well enough to display her firm curves, which was nice when it was time to get some attention.

  The pistol, however, hardly qualified as anything more than a peashooter against the space force rangers. Not that she wanted to kill any of them anyway. Aldriena only wanted to escape back into space and pick up her next assignment.

  In a couple of seconds, she came up with two positive possibilities. One, the Silvado. If she could get to her ship, she could at least delay her capture and even possibly escape. Two, they most likely wanted her alive. The UNSF would want to know what she knew.

  She leaped by a giant flat container nestled between the structural bars of the freighter. She ended up grazing the container and then stopping herself with a jolt by attaching her palms to its surface. Jumping felt faster than running, but she found it hard to gauge where she’d end up.

  She caught sight of a small black bulb affixed to one of the struts. She recognized it as a security device. She presumed Martin had somehow circumvented or subverted the freighter’s security measures, but had the rangers had time to get it back online?

  She fled past blue and green metal tubes as thick as her torso. Equipment lockers dotted the area. She considered hiding in one, but that seemed futile, since once she gave up her mobility they’d trap her there eventually. The barge didn’t have elevator shafts or ventilation ducts in which to hide.

  Aldriena tried to calm herself and think as she flitted through the interior of the barge, working her way around the struts and tanks. Surely, they would have posted a guard or watch device on her vessel? She took a sharp left. Most likely, they had a plan to prevent escape. The Silvado was no trinket, but it wasn't really hers, so she didn’t need to take it. On the other hand, what choice did she have other than the ranger’s ship, her own ship, or the barge itself?

  Were there any escape pods or shuttles on board?

  She asked for space transport services over her link. Nothing replied to her query except the Silvado. She inquired about the ship’s status. The Silvado confirmed her fears: it had been locked down with three rangers on external guard duty.

  A steel-toothed noise sent her reeling back into a wobbly sprint. It was a close miss from a sonic stunner. Aldriena tried to shake off her new headache and avoid running into anything. It was hard enough to run with sticky feet and low weight. Thankfully, she’d had some time to practice moving in the environment, but she’d probably be less accomplished at it than the rangers.

  The extreme exercise was helping to keep her warm. Only her face felt the sting of cold, but she ignored it. She brought up a link map in her head. It showed she approached a hydrogen transfer control station. She darted down a corridor on her right. A heavy metal door barred the way. She hurriedly invoked her Cascavel. The stealth link accessed an account that Martin had set up to suborn the hydrogen barge. Once logged in as an authorized user, Aldriena disarmed the lock and slipped inside.

  Warmth. The air beyond felt almost hot against her chilled face, even though it couldn’t have been more than fifteen degrees Celsius in the control station.

  The spartan rooms served as a nerve center for moving hydrogen to and from the barge. She stared at rows of manual controls covered in dust. Presumably, no one had used the controls since the barge had been constructed, since the barge was automated, and even the normal override mechanism was probably link-based. Aldriena assumed that one could do something dangerous from here, maybe even without authorization. Not that she knew how.

  A message came through her link.

  “You may as well come out. We’ve got you this time.”

  She smiled. It sounded like a cheesy vid. She could play along with that.

  “Come in here, and I’ll blow us all to hell,” she transmitted.

  “Let’s not get overdramatic, lady,” a voice replied.

  “Try me, cabrão.”

  A second or two ticked by. She scanned the controls for anything related to moving the hydrogen around.

  “We’re coming in. We don’t want to hurt you of course, but—”

  “You’ll hurt me all right. Beat me up and rape me, most likely.”

  More seconds.

  “You know we can’t do that. The mission is being monitored.”

  “Okay, have it your way,” she said. “Good-bye cruel world.”

  Aldriena disconnected and started searching for other exits. She examined the ceiling first, but soon concluded it didn’t offer any clever exit.

  She dropped to her knees and examined the base of a bank of manual controls. She spotted an access panel on the side. She pulled a plastic handhold, but it stubbornly refused to open up. Aware of the seconds slipping by, Aldriena switched hands and pulled frantically.

  Finally, the panel snapped away from the station. She set it down next to her, wondering how she could replace it if she crawled inside. She looked into the interior. The station base held a few cyblocs and some power conduits, but there weren’t any holes leading under the floor. It was a dead end.

  She stood up. Two marines stood across the room with their weapons pointed at her. Then a white hot flash of pain seized her chest. She fell in a heap.

  Aldriena drew a ragged breath as rough hands dragged her across the smooth tile floor and propped her up against a wall. Her eyes refocused. She saw two more rangers swagger in, tall men with short haircuts and hard eyes. Her chest felt numb. Her arm twitched, still partially possessed by the electrical weapon that had taken her down.

  Another soldier, a lieutenant, pulled her roughly by the arms to a standing position, although she had to lean against the wall.

  “Your superior isn’t going to be too happy with your behavior, soldier,” she said hoarsely.

  “Well, you see, someone blocked our link frequencies here on the freighter. Must have been Black Core operatives,” said the man closest to her. He smirked.

  Aldriena took his meaning. His superiors weren’t watching them after all, so he could do whatever he wanted. Aldriena took that news hard, but she set her mouth and met his gaze.

  “My man Faber here wants a word with you,” he said.

  Faber stepped forward. The man stood about six feet tall. He was clearly muscular, even through the thick fibers of his military ski
nsuit.

  “You almost offed me,” Faber said coldly.

  “You shot at me first,” Aldriena said.

  “We weren’t out to kill you or you’d be dead. You almost blew my head off. You see that? Ricocheted off the edge of my helmet, right here,” the ranger said.

  “You should’ve—”

  The back of the ranger’s hand cut off Aldriena’s smartass reply as it struck her face. He clasped his hands behind her head and pulled her torso into a knee strike. Her skinsuit distributed the blow well, but it still smarted. She slid back onto the floor without making a sound.

  “Huh. She’s wearin’ Momma Veer. Getter outta that skinsuit,” the man grunted.

  A couple of the rangers laughed. She felt pressure through her suit as two men grabbed each of her arms. Someone fiddled with her zipper tunnel and caught the clasp. Zzzzzzzzzzip. She felt cool air on her chest.

  “Nice,” one of them said.

  “Yeah, she’s hot.”

  Aldriena bucked and tried to clasp her legs around the head of the man in front of her, but they held her too tightly. Clearly, after the chase, they were expecting her to fight. She wondered if it was only bad luck that the squad didn’t have any women.

  “Lemme have another look,” Faber said. They pulled her off the wall and pinned her on the floor.

  Faber kneeled on her with his knee between her breasts. Aldriena felt her sternum would have broken under normal acceleration. She guessed he must have been over three hundred pounds in Earth gravity with all his equipment. He leaned forward until she could see every one of the scraggly whiskers on his chin. His breath smelled like bad medicine. She figured it was the space force mouthwash, ‘strong enough to kill even space germs’, as the enlisted men liked to joke.

  A strangled grunt escaped her. She couldn’t breathe.

  “Lucky for you you’re such a famous lady,” the man told her. “Else we’d deliver you … damaged.”

  Then he got up. Aldriena tried to breathe again, but she ended up rolling over and coughing. She almost passed out, but finally her lungs obeyed her command to fill with precious air.

  “Pull that suit off. Grab a feel if you like, but we gotta get her straight back so let’s hit it.”

  Aldriena closed her eyes while they yanked her out of the skinsuit. She felt hands roaming her body but she ignored them. A calloused hand clutched an ample handful of her right breast.

  “Damn, bro. We need to get back Earthside,” a man grumbled.

  “You got that right,” another one said.

  “I don’t have tail like that waiting for me back home.”

  Her face felt hot.

  I must be blushing. As if I had anything to blush about. What a stupid physical reaction.

  She should have been enraged, but she didn’t feel anything. This was the down side of being beautiful. She used her body often enough to her advantage, it was worth paying the price.

  After a few more seconds, the groping was over. They must have realized that the frustration they had created in themselves wasn’t worth anything. The squad glued her up and carried her to their troop carrier like a sack of potatoes. Warning stickers decorated the peeling paint of the entrance hatch of the squat craft. Inside, the carrier looked to be larger than Silvado. It smelled of sweat and electronics.

  As they walked pass the secondary bulkhead, her head struck the side of the hatch.

  “Careful Henderson, you’ll be cleanin’ up brains,” one of the men said.

  “Rotting brains would clear up the smell in here a little,” said another.

  They brought her into a small room with bare metal walls and a folding table. Cases of equipment were stacked in one corner. A machine the size of a motorcycle with a red plastic case sat next to the table. She couldn’t tell what it was, but a lot of cables ran in and out of the back and the top of it. The cables from the top were strewn across the table. The rangers thrust her down into a metal chair with restraining straps hanging from its sides. Her view righted itself to the normal perspective, and she saw a man in a red lab coat sitting directly across from her.

  His beady eyes regarded her coolly under the high, layered brow of a balding head. His frown lay deep-set into his face. He looked evil. She thought about attacking him, smashing his pointy head deeper into the soft fatty folds of his throat, but she rejected the idea because her legs still felt wobbly and the space force men were nearby.

  The man stood. He took a spray can of solvent and soaked her with it, removing most of the glue from her torso with precise swipes of his gloved hands. He didn’t seem to bat an eye at the sight of her shivering body clothed only in undersheers.

  He pulled a thick strap over her arm and attached it to the chair somewhere behind her.

  Last chance to beat this guy up.

  Aldriena didn’t have much choice. She remained still as he strapped her other arm down, then moved to her lower arms, torso, and legs. Her arm still quivered as if fighting her restraints on its own even though she didn’t have the will. Aldriena fought down a wave of panic at being unable to move.

  They don’t pay me enough for this.

  He picked up the cables one by one, and started to connect them to her with suction cups and conductive gel. A set went on her face and more on her back. He remained straight-faced. He even attached electrodes to her breasts without copping an extra feel. In a strange way, that scared her a little, because naked lust she could understand, and maybe use to her advantage.

  “That’s pretty old school,” Aldriena observed. “Do you really need to monitor physiological reactions when you can see into my brain?”

  The man didn’t say anything. Instead, he reached between her legs. She heard her undersheers tear and felt an invasion of her genitalia. She bucked in the chair.

  “You bastard! What the hell?”

  The man didn’t answer. Something cold slid into her bladder. She realized that he had introduced an auto-seeking catheter. Aldriena wondered if she’d really be here that long, or if the catheter was just to scare, humiliate, and demoralize her. That probably explained all the cables as well, she decided. The device probably worked by scanning her brain directly.

  The man stepped behind her, out of sight. A voice came through her link.

  “This is a lie detection device. I am the operator software. The use of this device has been authorized by the UNSF because it has been determined there is imminent danger to the citizens of Earth.”

  “Whatever,” Aldriena replied aloud in a drawl. She tried to disconnect her link but her link didn’t obey. She knew that was bad, because world citizens were supposed to have a right to privacy that extended to cover the links in their heads. She thought that if the UNSF was willing to ignore that right then they might hurt her to find out as much as they could about Insidious.

  She felt the cool caress of a drug sprayer on her deltoid. Interrogation chemicals, she thought.

  The front of the machine had a logo on it. Aldriena looked at it for a second and then identified it as the red silhouette of a scorpion.

  “What do you know about a project codenamed Insidious?”

  Well, might as well see how good the UNSF lie detectors are, she thought.

  “Insidious? Nothing.”

  A red light glittered on the top of the device.

  “Oh, so I’m supposed to get all upset that you red-lighted me?” she asked. “Is that supposed to make my heart race? Make me sweat?”

  “You do know,” the operator said in a neutral voice. “Please elucidate.”

  She took a deep breath. “No, I don’t know.”

  “You do know. Please consider the danger your silence could pose to Earth.”

  “Sorry.”

  “If you don’t comply, you will be held indefinitely. The UNSF cannot negotiate with your employer for your eventual return. You will no longer have any means to support yourself above subsistence level.”

  Aldriena gave a false smile. Subsistence level was
a state of utter poverty so severe that sometimes even basic needs weren’t met. Anyone on Earth who didn’t work for a megacorporation or the world government knew intimately how bad the official subsistence level was.

  Sigh. Time for a strategic retreat.

  “Project Insidious is an espionage effort directed toward some of the deep space stations,” Aldriena said.

  “True,” the voice replied evenly. “Thank you for your cooperation. Which space stations are involved in the project?”

  “Synchronicity. Xanadu. Avalon. Thermopylae. Tanelorn. Maybe others, I don’t know.”

  Aldriena’s vision fuzzed for a moment and then cleared itself.

  Oh, shit. Here we go. I was always better on the other side of coercion.

  “What information in particular is Project Insidious trying to retrieve?”

  Aldriena hesitated. Then her whole body clenched convulsively like her arm, as if to eject the answer like vomit.

  “Technological secrets.”

  “Whose technological secrets is Project Insidious trying to retrieve?”

  A drop of sweat trickled down her neck. Aldriena tried to imagine that it was Martin’s lips. Then in a perverse inversion of her imagination, she ended up with the mental image of the hideous technician behind her, gnawing on her neck. She managed to forget the question.

  “Whose technological secrets is Project Insidious trying to retrieve?”

  Damn. Just get it over with.

  “Captain. Slicer. Claw. Hitler. Red.”

  “For what company or companies do Captain. Slicer, Claw, Hitler, and Red work?”

  “I don’t know.” The words exploded from her. Finally, a question she didn’t have to fight. She tried to marshal her will to sidestep the next question.

  “For what company or companies do Captain, Slicer, Claw, Hitler, and Red work?”