The Animus Gate (Book One of The Animus Trilogy) Page 21

She had Darius hold it while he fiddled with a wristpad. “Watch this.”

  Kilpatrick pressed a button on her pad, and a four-inch blade sprang out of the middle knuckle. “I’ll bet your hand can’t do that.”

  “I’ll admit, this is impressive tech, doc. Tell you what, let me think about it. I gotta head back to the council to talk about some things, then I’ll make my final decision.”

  “Of course, of course,” said Kilpatrick. “I wouldn’t expect anyone to decide on something like this right away. Just let us know when you’re on your way back here, and we’ll get the OR ready, if you want to go ahead with it.”

  “The OR?”

  “Operating room.”

  “Right, yeah.” Darius ran a hand through his hair. “I need a stiff drink.”

  “I think this will be the right decision, Darius. And you wouldn’t be alone.” Kilpatrick rapped her right leg with a knuckle. It made a metallic sound. “There’s plenty of people on this ship who’ve been in the same boat as you. So you have people to talk to any time, to help you adjust.”

  “Thanks, doc. I’ll let you know in a bit.”

  Darius headed back to the council chambers. It looked like they were all in attendance this time. No surprise there. His last debrief had been one for the ages.

  This time, they all stood up to greet him.

  “Have a seat,” said Van Chen.

  He took the only one available, which was next to her again.

  “So as you might expect,” she continued, “the Council has some follow-up questions. The first one is from Alexei Schneider, who is a member of the Pegasus hydroponics department. Raymond wants to know what will happen to you now without the neppa injections. Is there withdrawal? Are there side effects that can impact your ability to perform your duties?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” said Darius. “Just the usual amount of muscle atrophy that you would expect to see when halting any drug treatment that enhances muscle growth.”

  “All right,” said Van Chen. “The next one is from Cynthia Dolan, whom you met earlier. Do you have any information at all indicating where another one of these ancient vaults might be?”

  “I’m afraid that I do not, ma’am. The only new data I know of is the possible coordinates of the...dimensional portal station, I guess you’d call it. Which we discussed in the debrief.”

  “Okay, third and final question,” said Van Chen. “This one is from me. If the empire decided that you weren’t worth the trouble, where would you go? What would you want to do with your life?”

  Darius looked down at his hands. “I have promises to keep. And things to atone for.” He looked her dead in the eye. “There is no going back. The only way out is through.”

  Van Chen smiled. “I was hoping you would say that. I think the extraction of agent Markosian would be a good place to start.”

  ✽✽✽

  The Federation had traced Nadira to a swamp on the planet of Eloris. The facility was small. Apparently, the empire wanted as few of its people as possible to know where they’d taken her. Maybe they were having trust issues as well. But while the secrecy had made her difficult to track down, it also put an extraction within the realm of credibility. If she had been put in a standard imperial prison, the Federation would have been facing a small army and many layers of high-grade security.

  “But now that you’re in the wind,” Van Chen told him as they sat in the council chambers, “they may be expecting you to come looking for her next. You may be walking into a trap.”

  “The thought had occurred to me, ma’am.”

  “It occurred to me as well,” said Alexei Schneider. “I think it would be best if we asked for volunteers only, due to the high risk involved.”

  Van Chen looked around the table. “Do we have a second?”

  Dolan raised her hand. “I second the motion.”

  “Then let’s put it to a vote,” said Van Chen. “All in favor of using volunteers only, say aye.”

  The majority of the council said aye.

  “The ayes have it,” said Van Chen. “We will go forward with volunteers only.” She turned to Darius. “I assume you want to take the lead on this mission.” She looked down at his security glove. “If that’s the case, we need to remove your killswitch. Are you prepared to do that?”

  “Not really, ma’am, but it looks like I have no other choice.”

  “All right, then you head back to Kilpatrick to do the operation, and the council and I will put together a list of potential volunteers.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I would like to make the final call on all prospective team members, though. And we should keep it small. No more than four.”

  “Agreed. You’ll need at least 24 hours for the graft to be field-ready anyway, so that should give us plenty of time to review our candidates. And Darius...”

  “Ma’am?”

  She took his left hand. “Thank you for doing this. I know you feel like you’re responsible in some way for how things have gone down, but...I’ve seen people walk away from this kind of thing before. People who I had thought were very brave.”

  “I will do everything I can to bring her back for you, ma'am.” He looked around the table. “And for the Federation.”

  Van Chen nodded and looked down. “Thank you, private.”

  There was definitely some kind of connection between Van Chen and Nadira, but now didn’t look like the right time to inquire. So Darius nodded and headed back to the doctor to get his hand chopped off.

  They gave him local anesthesia at his request. They peeled the security glove back so that it barely covered his wrist. This was the first time that Darius had seen all the scars from the Shiza love bite he’d gotten back on Kareeva. If not for the neppa injections he’d been getting at the time, he might have lost the whole arm already.

  As Darius lay on the operating table, Kilpatrick temporarily halted the flow of blood in his arm and prepared a device for it that looked like a miniature guillotine.

  Kilpatrick said that this created a cleaner attachment for the graft, and quick removal was better for a patient who chose local anesthesia. Some people experienced “distress” if exposed to the noises and smells of the procedure for an extended period of time.

  Darius didn’t look down at the operation at all. He just put the earplugs in and stared at the ceiling. Then Kilpatrick put her hand on Darius’s shoulder, indicating to him that they were about to make the cut. Darius nodded and resumed his inspection of the OR’s overhead lighting.

  There was just a jolt, and it was gone. There was no pain. Then he felt a few shoves as they inserted his new hand into his wrist. The staff spent the next hour or two making the initial graft while he listened to music and tried to imagine he was somewhere else. Like on a beach.

  Kilpatrick nodded at him again, and Darius sat up to finally take a look at their work. He pulled his earplugs out. He hadn’t looked at many grafts up close, but this one looked clean. There was little blood. There was some distant pain when he rotated his wrist.

  “Try not to do that too much just yet,” said Kilpatrick. “For the first 24 hours or so, we need to keep that joint more or less immobile. Your fingers, too. The next step now is to move you to an observation room to monitor the progress of the graft, and to administer the pain suppressants and anti-rejection compounds. How are you feeling so far?”

  “As well as can be expected, I guess.”

  “Any nausea or shortness of breath?”

  “Not that I can tell,” said Darius. “What would that indicate?”

  “The transition is difficult for some people, Darius. It may become difficult for you later. When we’re done with the observation, we’ll be sending you out the door with some anxiolytics.”

  “Anti-anxiety drugs?”

  “You may never need them. But some people feel better just having them on-hand. Uh, so to speak.”

  Darius managed to crack a smile.

  Kilpatrick patted him on the back. �
��All right, son. Nurse Chadwick and Specialist Bisset here are going to take you over to the observation room. They’ll be able to answer any questions you may have.”

  “Thanks, doc.”

  Kilpatrick nodded and smiled. “I think you made the right decision.”

  They took him to a brightly lit room down the hall and sat him down carefully on a bed. Once he was alone, he used voice instructions to redirect his wristpad display to the screen mounted in a corner of the room. The council was already sending him individual profiles for each potential volunteer, and he had decided that now was as good a time as any to start picking through them.

  Sandra Cahill was their first submission.

  ✽✽✽

  As Darius had suspected, Cahill didn’t take much convincing. The chance to take a high-value asset out of the empire’s clutches was hard to resist, despite the dangers. Another possible team member was a former imperial spy named David Bellamy who currently operated as PFC Chandra’s handler.

  Darius figured that any friend of Chandra’s was a friend of his. And Bellamy had been the one ultimately responsible for pulling Darius out of the Hephaestus job in the nick of time. It had been the spy’s idea to tag Darius with a tracker, just in case.

  Darius put his grafted hand in a sling and met the prospective team in one of the briefing rooms on the Pegasus.

  “According to our aerial spy bots," he told them, "the facility on Eloris is elevated above the swamp. But the ambient temperature is high, so they pull in water from a lake to assist with their coolant tech. I think we can squeeze into the intake pipes and make it into the main reservoir just below the structure.”

  “What then?” asked Cahill.

  “From there,” said Bellamy, “we can exit into the extraction processing section and trigger an error that will have a maintenance crew sent our way. At that point, we can use their credentials to enter the main building and proceed to the cell block.”

  Cahill rubbed her chin and looked over the blueprints. “What kind of resistance should we expect inside the facility?”

  “The guards should be armed with less-lethal weapons,” said Bellamy. “They’ll have a small armory of lethal weapons under lock and key. According to regulations, only the warden will have the credentials to open it, and the procedure can only be conducted from within their office. So if we infiltrate when the warden is off-duty, one of us can intercept them when they make a dash for it.”

  “I expect the staff will be wearing light armor that they can environmentally seal,” said Darius. “It’ll be a tier or two below what I’m wearing right now. So it can handle shrapnel, but not high-caliber projectiles or flechettes. Our best bet is probably to corner them with concentrated fire.”

  “Or we could use the armory as a honey trap,” said Cahill. “Let them unlock it, then contain them there when they go running for the big guns.”

  “Let’s use that as the backup plan if we can’t intercept the warden,” said Darius.

  Cahill nodded. “And what about exfil?”

  “That’s the tricky part,” said Darius. “If we can lure them to the armory and contain them, then we can probably just head out the front door. They have no guard towers or automated turrets. Just a couple troops outside, monitoring the entrance. Should be easy to deal with them.”

  “If we can’t get containment,” said Bellamy, “Then we have to shoot our way out. Could get messy.”

  “Well, we have some force multipliers at our disposal,” said Cahill. “Assuming we're using environmentally sealed suits, we can use ordnance for poison gas, sleeping gas, smoke, and flash bombs. And when all else fails,” she added with a smile, “my grenade launcher.”

  Bellamy shot Darius a glance.

  Darius shrugged. “She’s a Marine.”

  “Regardless,” said Bellamy, “Poison and sleeping gas are probably out if we're going to be retreiving someone. Target selection tends to be messy in this kinds of incursions.” “Fair point,” said Darius. “Let’s stick to flashbangs and smoke.”

  “Sounds good,” said Cahill. “Which got a new shipment in of the kind with particles that block infrared. Very fancy.”

  The three of them were on their way out on a rapid-deployment personnel transport two hours later. The pilot, Rosalie Figueroa, would technically be the fourth team member.

  Darius wondered how much Van Chen knew about Nadira. He wondered how much anyone knew about her. But if breaking her out of prison was a necessary step on the path towards repairing what he had done to his mother’s life, he would do it over and over until he had nothing left. Nadira was the only one who knew where the evidence of the Emperor’s crimes was hidden.

  So she had to live. She also had to live because of how Rali had decided to die.

  And he had secrets of his own, he supposed. In the end, he hadn’t mentioned the phrase he learned in the mushroom tea dream. Until the mole was rooted out of the Federation, information that sensitive just didn’t feel right to share. Especially not with the whole Council, none of whom he knew.

  So it was time to thread the needle again.

  -13-

  The team landed a few klicks away from the facility on Eloris, to help preserve their stealth. The ship was outfitted for sneaking around, but you could never be too careful. Unlike Hephaestus, the infiltration team couldn’t simply come back later with a larger force, because the empire would simply move the prisoner first.

  This also meant a decent trek through a regional swamp, and the planet’s atmosphere was particularly caustic. Their suits would seal out the environment and keep them breathing, but not forever. According to Bellamy, the imperial troops stationed here had to apply a special gel to protect their armor against the elements, and it stank to high heaven. And of course, this gel also reportedly attracted local wildlife for the occasional taste test.

  Needless to say, Eloris was not a popular post, and it was manned by a particularly grumpy rotation of troops, some of whom were even sent down as punishment.

  Darius’s team traveled to the prison by way of an inflatable raft. He had been assured that it would not melt in this stew, nor be chomped in half by this planet’s version of a crocodile. Gods knew he’d tangled with enough bitey lizards to last a lifetime.

  They eventually came to a shallow lake that fed the facility with coolant. The whole structure had been built above the water on stilts. In theory, this made a sneaky escape more difficult. The building was boxy, dingy, and strewn with vines and moss like everything else in the area. Its large windows were designed to let guards survey the area at a glance. They were made of plasteel in case anyone got ideas about breaking them open to make an escape. And they were tinted and infrared-filtered to prevent anyone like him from spying on the interior.

  If not for the lights and the troops wandering around outside, one might have thought the building had been abandoned long ago. As it was, it looked like something that had only recently been raised from the lake itself.

  A long bridge connected the building to the lakeside, where there was a gate and a watchpost. That was where the team was supposed to make its exit, assuming it was lightly defended.

  Either way, they hadn’t detected any orbiting imperial vessels. The facility wasn't due for resupply for another week, and the empire liked to keep their classified prisons low-key. If these troops called for help, it wouldn't be coming any time soon. The infiltration team had that going for it, at least.

  To enter, they came to the lake’s edge from another direction, clipped flipper attachments to their boots, and waded into the mire. Critters slithered around Darius’s legs as he worked his way in. He tried not to imagine how large they might be.

  Once they got far in enough to be fully submerged, they used sonar pings to find their way through the murky depths. The aquatic denizens of Eloris would certainly hear the noise, but not the guards milling around the entrance.

  Even with the aid of sonar, the team had to go halfway to the struc
ture before they picked up the location of the coolant intake.

  For the highest security, an architect would just drill some holes and set up filtration within the pipeline. But filters and screens get clogged over time, especially in a swamp. They need to be easily replaceable. That meant that the pipe had a set of filters that could be popped off with a screwdriver. The pipes were even large enough to swim through, because smaller ones would require more frequent filter replacements.

  Overall, using swamp water to help with thermal management seemed like a considerable design flaw. According to the files the Federation had collected, it was a flaw that the empire had been willing to accept because this coolant tech was cheap and simple to operate. And the facility was supposed to be more or less classified anyway. What could possibly go wrong?

  After a few minutes of fiddling, Bellamy worked the grate off the intake, and they were inside the pipe. At that point, the suction pumps inside the building pulled them right into a reservoir underneath the main building. It was covered by another simple grate, built only to keep wildlife from crawling in. It wasn’t designed to keep people out.

  This area was currently unoccupied—another stroke of luck. And there were no sentry cameras that they could see. Not that they expected any, at this rate.

  With every flip of the coin that went their way, Darius’s tension increased.

  “Infiltration of places like this is actually pretty easy,” said Cahill quietly. “Most of the empire’s installations are designed by the lowest bidder. They also underestimate how knowledgeable the resistance is about these supposedly secret jails. It’s the lazy swagger of the 800-pound gorilla who thinks they’ve defeated all who would aspire to wear the crown.”

  “Before I met the Federation,” said Darius, “I would have assumed that Sar-Zin was going to outlive us all.”

  Cahill nodded. “They made a lot of enemies within. The Federation may not be large enough to commit to a direct assault on the Agamemnon, but we’re strong in other ways.”

  When you're not getting infiltrated yourselves, thought Darius.