She hastily turned to leave and barged straight into someone.
“Oh! Sorry, Aster,” said Felix as he appeared stumble past her.
“Sorry.” Aster mumbled nervously.
There was an awkward silence between them as they avoided eye contact for a moment.
“Aster, I…” Felix began, his left hand clenched into a fist, “about yesterday…I guess it’s better to just let old ghosts rest, huh?”
“Yeah,” Aster replied, unsure of what to say to that, “…listen, I hate this too. But the best thing we can do to honour their memory is to keep working on the project.”
“Sure, that’s something to work for.” Felix said with a nod.
He didn’t really seem to believe it, and neither did Aster.
They hastily parted ways as Aster hurried back across the main lab floor to her office. Now all she had to do was leave the building, give the blue decoy chip to Jezebel and the red chip with the real data to the DNI, and everything should be fine.
Aster had to pass through the breakroom on her way back. But as she stepped through the doors, she found several of her staff gathered there being questioned by a team of security guards. Their uniforms were those of J.E. Co.’s in-house security team, and the staff looked anxious. One of them pointed a shaking finger at Aster as she walked in.
“There she is, sir.” The technician said nervously.
The security guards turned to her, then stood to one side as someone stepped forwards. He was instantly recognisable to everyone who worked for the company.
He was a stout man with a bushy black moustache and carefully combed, dark hair styled with white streaks. He was dressed in a smart blue suit, but had ditched the frilled collar he usually wore with it, and he had a scowl on his face even nastier than his usual frown.
“Dr Aster Thorn?” He asked gloweringly.
“Good morning, Chairman Darius.” Aster said respectfully.
“Come with me.” Darius ordered.
“Is there something–?” Aster tried to ask.
“Now.” Darius barked like a drill instructor.
Being spoken to in such an imperious tone by some pompous fleekster made Aster twitch involuntarily in anger. But this particular ‘pompous fleekster’ was her boss, so she swallowed her pride and did as she was instructed.
Then the power died.
The entire facility was plunged into pitch blackness amid scattered yelps of panic in the corridors before dull-red floor lighting activated automatically, guiding people to the exits. Aster was left disoriented by the sudden darkness, even as the backup generators kicked in after a brief delay, restoring power and light to the building.
“What the fleek!?” Darius bellowed.
The emergency floor lighting remained on, and staff members followed them as they hastily made their way to the exits. Aster was carried along with the crowds as she followed the floor lighting along with everyone else to the main entrance hall, pushing and shoving her way through to get enough space.
Blackouts were virtually unheard of. This was, after all, a modern city with a modern power infrastructure. It had to be a localised blackout, and since there was no emergency alarm or automated voice advising people to head for the exits, it couldn’t be an emergency shutdown. Someone had to have manually shut off the power.
Darius didn’t have to push or shove his way through the crowds, his security escort did that for him as they cleared the way for their boss.
“Everyone, shut up!” Darius bellowed, silencing the hubbub of panicked chatter, “It’s just a temporary power failure. Someone go and look at the systems to see what happened. Everybody else, get back to work. All work schedules will continue as normal today.”
The crowd murmured their acknowledgment and began to file back out of the entrance hall in a more or less orderly fashion. Darius wasn’t the most pleasant boss to work for, but at least he was back and giving some sort of leadership.
“You,” Darius pointed a pudgy finger at Aster, “You’re coming with me.”
“You think I had something to do with this?” Aster demanded incredulously.
“I don’t know what the fleek is going on,” Darius shot back, red-faced, “but I’m pretty damned sure Jezebel is responsible for it.”
Aster’s heart leapt into her mouth. Had she been found out already?
Two burly security guards tried to grab Aster, but she yanked her arms free and scowled at them, making clear that she wouldn’t be dragged away like some convict. Without another word, they escorted her to the elevator – in full view of her colleagues – following close behind Chairman Darius.
Apprehension built in Aster’s stomach as she was led into the elevator and escorted up to the top floors of J.E. Co.’s head offices. She put her hands in her pockets, holding the blue decoy chip in her right hand nervously.
Her left hand closed around air.
Aster’s stomach tightened into a horrified knot as she groped around frantically in her pocket for the red data chip. But she couldn’t feel anything in her pocket.
The red chip was gone.
* * *
‘You can’t kill your way to victory’, or so a great general whose name had been lost to obscurity is said to have remarked. In theory, that meant the key to victory was to break the enemy’s will to fight rather than to kill him outright. Or perhaps it was just a piece of strategic folk wisdom passed down through the centuries. In any case, Gabriel and what remained of his squad were testing that theory to destruction.
The Faithful hunted them through the endless, three-dimensional labyrinth of the temple, showing no sign of wanting to give up the chase. Time and again, the squad escaped from or beat back one hunting party only to be ambushed by another as they pushed through the maze of identical corridors and sub-chambers. The only ‘progress’ they could measure was in the number of kills they made.
They weren’t heading in any particular direction, either. There was no place to which they could fall back, and the mind-bending inconsistency of the gravity made it impossible to get their bearings one way or another. They would leave through the side of one sub-chamber only to emerge on the ceiling of another.
The Faithful, on the other hand, were accustomed to navigating through their temple, and made effective use of jump-packs and gravity belts as they bounced from surface to surface. But what the squad lacked in numbers and firepower, they made up for in tenacity and determination to survive; and they managed to fight their way through wave after wave of fanatical pursuers to the bottom-most chamber of the temple.
Cato fired several bursts at the enemy behind them. But the attackers had formed a shield wall with their wrist-mounted personal barriers, and the bullets swerved sharply up into the ceiling or sideways with a series of clattering noises.
“Spare frag, anybody?” Cato called out.
“Nope!” Viker replied.
“None here!” Gabriel said.
“I’m out as well!” Bale answered.
This was bad. Each of their weapons fired tiny pellets of metal shaved off from a single block inside the gun’s frame, which meant they could expend tens of thousands of rounds without running out of shots. But their bullets were next to useless against those wrist-shields, and the squad had run out of explosives to overcome them.
Gabriel glanced around at the chamber, noticing that it was much larger than the cube-shaped sub-chambers they had passed through. The chamber was shaped like a hemisphere and was full of lab machinery arranged around some kind of basalt column in the centre stretching from floor to ceiling. But there was nothing that could help them fight back.
“Viker, cover me!” Gabriel ordered as he stowed his weapon and drew the xenotech sword he had taken earlier.